The soft measures beloved of advertising agencies are the self reported measures of brand and advertising recall, and claimed behaviour and attitude changes. They are used so much we can't avlide considering them. And they may be used because there aren't a lot of other ways of measuring advertising short of sales - which is rarely a useful measure for advertising.

In recent years there has been more of a focus on an advocacy ladder. In other words how many non users have you got, how many are aware of your product, how many would consider buying it and so on right through to repeat buyers and advocates. By measuring the number in each group and trying to migrate people upt through the levels you have a better impression of the impact of communications.

These are stil soft measures because they depend on self reporting. In other words the person who you are interviewing talking about what they remember. And people are notoriously bad at reporting their own behaviour and attitutes reliably and consistently.  So use with care!

The other major weakness for setting up these kinds of measures to get an impression about the impact of communications is that it is difficult to isolate the effect of a particular advertising campaign. The reason why they are so enthusiastic may be because they use the product a lot not because they have been exposed to a lot of communication material. They won't be able to tell you this! So act with caution. I gave you a list of other kinds of measures back in Waggle 13 so you can see there are plenty to consider as alternatives.

The last soft measure is the netpromoter score - a measure invented by Reicheld - to measure the proportion of people who will recommend your product. If this increases after what ever you are planning then that can often be taken as a useful measure. Even if it is difficult to attribute this increase exclusively to what it was that you did.

This concludes my list of softer measures. I am not negative about them. But I am realistic about how much they can be taken as a measure of communications activity. Famous advertising doesn't in itself drive sales. So it may be that you might do better finding more behavioural type scales instead of measuring that people remember famous campaigns.