One of the most basic tests of marketing communication effectiveness is awareness. Is the target market aware of your brand or your message? Over the past two years a lot of effort has been put into generating awareness of the AMA's Academic Resource Center (ARC).

The ARC Web site is the electronic outlet of the Academic Division of the AMA, reachable at the following URL: http://www.marketingpower.com/arc.

The purpose of the ARC is to provide a timely, trusted, useful, and enjoyable source of information for AMA members and the worldwide academic marketing community.

What’s been done to generate awareness of the ARC?

• The ARC has been discussed at each of the last four AMA conferences during the heavily attended Saturday luncheon.
• The ARC has been the subject of a column in every issue of the MarketingAcademics@AMA newsletter since December 2004. (In fact, you are reading another column right now!)
• A link to the ARC appears on the home page of the AMA's MarketingPower.com Web site, and a link to the ARC is included on the navigation bar that appears on every page of the site.
• It is promoted to the more than 5000 marketing academics who subscribe to the ELMAR e-mail list service. Multiple links to the ARC appear on every ELMAR posting and on every page on the ELMAR archive Web site.

By this point you are probably thinking, "Enough Already! Why the overkill?" Presumably the target audience has been saturated, satiated, and is sick to death of being reminded that the ARC exists. There can't possibly be a marketing academic on the planet who doesn't know about the ARC. Right?

The AMA recently undertook an online survey of marketing academics to help prioritize the acquisition of new content on the ARC. Although the results were quite interesting, and I will focus on the new content suggestions in future columns, I want to share the results regarding awareness of the ARC. Among those sampled, awareness of the ARC was 21%. The figure was higher among AMA Academic Members, who comprised 27% of the sample, with 44% of respondents aware of the ARC. Still, that is somewhat less than impressive.

Like many researchers, I find that I have an unlimited capacity for post hoc explanations of anomalous data. I believe that you would have to say that a 44% awareness rate among AMA members after such a heavy publicity blitz is somewhat anomalous. Here are my post hoc hypotheses:

• H1: Marketing academics are more concerned about their own careers than with information from AMA about the ARC.
• H2: Marketing academics are too busy seeking information about Special Interest Group (SIG) activities, conferences, and other offline activities to think about the ARC.
• H3: Marketing academics are too focused on information they can use in their research to spend time listening to publicity about the ARC.
• H4: Marketing academics are too busy fulfilling their service obligations to think about the ARC.
• H5: Marketing academics are preoccupied by preparing their lectures, picking cases, and thinking about homework assignments and have no time left to pay attention to messages about the ARC.

It would be very ironic if any of these hypotheses were true, since the ARC has been created to make marketing academics more effective in their careers, more knowledgeable about community activities, and more efficient in their research, teaching, and service. Here is a post hoc analysis:

Career (H1): The ARC has information on jobs, degrees, awards, international opportunities, and consortia.

Community (H2): SIG activities are posted on the ARC, as is conference news, newsletters, and other activities, such as blogs and listservs.

Research (H3): Calls for papers, journal contact information, bibliographies, theories, software, data, funding, and scales all can be found on the ARC.

Service (H4): The ARC has sections for tips on service and on being a better reviewer.

Teaching (H5): There is a growing collection of cases, videos, textbooks, assignments, PowerPoint slides, syllabi, assessments, and class software simulations on the ARC.

Although we all know that it is difficult to put much faith in post hoc analyses, I’m hoping that you will make my exercise moot by visiting the ARC at http://www.marketingpower.com/arc.