Abstract

The Foote, Cone, and Belding (FCB) grid was developed to help advertising practitioners think strategically and situationally about the way consumers make purchase decisions. It was a prominent theoretical perspective for scholars in the 1980s but has been neglected in recent years. Moreover, what little research does exist on the FCB grid seems to misunderstand one of its primary tenets: that its axes of thinking, feeling, and involvement do not label the products themselves but the way consumers think about purchasing these products. This is unfortunate, because the situational thinking that the grid stimulates is ideal for a world where media channels are increasingly digital and social. In this article, we outline the FCB grid’s original propositions as a strategic tool and discuss some of ways it has been misinterpreted along the way. We then explicate its potential for practitioners and scholars in the contemporary media environment, propose our own grid of appropriate channels for each quadrant, and offer some guidance for future scholars to leverage this theory moving forward.

摘要

Foote, Cone, and Belding (FCB) 网格的开发是为了帮助广告从业者从战略上和情境上思考消费者做出购买决定的方式。这是1980年代学者们突出的理论视角，但近年来却被忽视了。此外，关于 FCB 网格的很少研究似乎误解了其主要原则之一：其思考、感觉和参与的轴不标记产品本身，而是消费者考虑购买这些产品的方式。这是不幸的，因为网格激发的情境思维对于媒体渠道越来越数字化和社交化的世界来说是理想的。在本文中，我们概述了 FCB 电网作为战略工具的原始主张，并讨论了它在此过程中被误解的一些方式。