Communicating a Key Benefit Claim Creatively and Effectively through Five Conveyor Properties

In today's clutter of marketing communications, creative advertisements are capable of grabbing the viewers' attention with the aim of conveying the product's key benefit claim (KBC). A proven technique for drawing attention to an ad and communicating a KBC is the use of a "remote conveyor" that is seemingly unrelated to the product (e.g., a dolphin and a sports watch for conveying its waterproofness). Drawing on associative memory theory, this article investigates the potentially antagonistic relationship between five "curiosity-raising" (originality) and "benefit-conveying" (effectiveness) properties of a sample of 167 conveyors for communicating the KBC of four different products. The conveyors were generated in a nominal brainstorming session with 20 MBA students. This article also provides real-life examples to illustrate the role of the five conveyor properties in getting across the message creatively and effectively. Creatives and do-it-yourself advertisers alike can easily apply the outlined procedure for generating and selecting conveyors. (C) 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.