This Summary of 'The psychology of Advertising' is written and donated to WorldSupporter in 2013-2014.
Advertising = any form of paid communication by an identified sponsor, aimed to inform and/or persuade target audiences about an organization, product, service or idea.
Advertising doesn’t create needs, but channels needs by reshaping them into wants. A side effect is the growing importance of a brand = the label with which to designate an individual product and differentiate it from competitors. Unique Selling Proposition (USP) = a summary statement used to meaningfully differentiate the brand from the competition. This is the key challenge in building brands.
Newspapers and magazines are among the main advertising media. Advertisers reach about a billion people per day through display and classified ads. Market shares have decreased due to television and internet, but magazines are still popular when targeting audiences with special interests; consumer segments that share common interests, values, or lifestyles.
Informational/argument-based appeal = straightforwardly informing consumers about the product, its price, and where it can be bought. This approach is also called the ‘reason-why approach’. A less aggressive approach, emotional/affect-based appeal = aiming to influence the consumer’s feelings/emotions rather than his thoughts. These appeals coexist.
Advertising had a place in society on an aggregate level:
On an individual level, advertising can inform and persuade the individual consumer. With informing, the emphasis is on creating/influencing non-evaluative consumer responses like knowledge or beliefs. When persuading, the focus is on generating/changing an evaluative (valenced) response, in which the advertised brand is viewed as more favourable than before compared to competitors.
Motive for an informational appeal: to communicate something new and potentially relevant about a product, service or idea. Used more frequently for durable goods (products that can be used repeatedly, e.g. a freezer), than for non-durable goods (e.g. food). They are also more often used in developed countries than in developing ones. The most frequent communications are about performance, availability, components/attributes, price, quality and special offers.
The product life cycle (PLC) has four stages:
For more complex new products/services, advertising may provide a means to ‘educate’ the consumer about the way they work. For existing products, informational appeals are also used when there are problems with the product. Communicating a product recall = informing consumers that they need to return their product for repair of refunding (e.g. safety implications). Advertising may also have a corrective function = used when consumers have misconceptions of the product or when its reputation is bad.
Informing consumers may sometimes backfire or be ineffective in changing misconceptions. In that case, you need persuasive appeals = intended to change consumer responses (e.g. McDonald’s stating that their burger were made of 100% pure beef after the rumour that they used worms to produce their foods). The function of advertising is to aid in the marketing or products and services, and the key function of marketing is to facilitate the exchange of value between manufacturers and consumers. It is the persuasion brought by advertising that should result in buying/using the product. In all PLC stages persuasion strategies will flank information appeals in order to increase the odds of consumers responding positively to the product.
Advertisers can use two strategies to achieve the goal of persuasion:
Alpha strategies include the use of strong, compelling arguments that justify accepting the message position, or communication scarcity. Omega strategies reduce resistance by directly counter arguing consumer concerns; distracting consumers to interfere with their concerns regarding the message position; reframing the message so that it does not appear to be a blatant persuasive attack; or using negative emotions.
Current views on advertising effectiveness
Naïve approach = advertising simply must be effective because it is so omnipresent and expenditures are vast and ever increasing.
Economic approach = correlates advertising expenditures with changes in sales volume in order to address the effects.
Media approach = effectiveness is conceptualized in terms of the number of individuals in a target population who have been exposed to a message, thereby looking at the reach of the message. Problem: it cannot inform on the impact of the exposure.
Creative approach = a message is effective to the extent that is it well-made and creative.
Psychological approach = aims at identifying advertising effects at the individual level. Specific advertising stimuli are related to specific and individual consumer responses. It also seeks to articulate the intrapersonal, interpersonal, or group-level psychological processes that are responsible for the relationship between ad stimuli and consumer responses. This is the perspective adopted by this book.
Cognitive consumer responses = beliefs and thoughts about brands, products, and services that consumer generate in response to advertising. Include brand awareness, recall, and recognition, but also associations, attitudes and preferences.
Affective responses = various more or less transient emotions and moods that can occur as a function of ad exposure. Differ in valence and intensity. E.g. warmth, irritation, fear, pride.
Behavioural responses = the intention and actual behaviour in response to advertising, like buying the product, choosing a brand, product trial, brand switching, and discarding a product.
Relationships can be correlational or causal:
Correlation = an observed change in one variable is associated with a change in the other (increase-increase = positive correlation & increase-decrease = negative correlation. 0 correlation = no relationship). Correlation is a necessary, but insufficient condition for causality. To infer that A causes B, three conditions must be met:
An experiment is particularly suited to establish causality. It involves manipulating one or more antecedents (independent variables) and assessing their impact on the consequence (dependent variable).
Random assignment ensures that the effects can be reliably attributed to the independent variables. Factorial experiment = when two or more variables are manipulated within the same design.
Mediation analysis = attempts to identify the intermediary psychological processes that are responsible for the effect of an independent on the dependent variable. There is mediation if:
Moderator = individual difference that strengthens or changes the direction of the effect of the independent on the dependent variable. The effect of A on B is different for various levels of C.
Advertising effects can be best understood as joint or interaction effects between situational and person variables. An advertising message may have a larger impact on one consumer group than on another or the direction of the effect may differ. Situational variables = external, environmental variables that act as independent/moderator variables that affect some consumer outcome (e.g. the promotional mix). Person variables = internal dimensions to a specific individual which typically act as moderators (e.g. consumer involvement or knowledge). Individual difference variables include personality traits like need for recognition and need for cognitive closure.
Sources of advertising messages can be individuals, organizations or brands behind the product or service. A direct source is a spokesperson delivering a message or demonstrating a product. An indirect source is only associated with the product/service.
Credibility includes the dimensions of source expertise and trustworthiness. It mainly influences message processing and persuasion when recipients are not very motivated to process the message. Trustworthiness can be conveyed by stressing that the message source does not have a vested interest in delivering the message.
Many products are sold by appealing to sexual attraction and beauty. Attractiveness frequently functions as a halo: what is beautiful is good. The attractiveness halo-effect can easily extend beyond the model itself to positively affect the products with which he/she is associated.
Argument quality = what is communicated about the product. An argument is strong when a desirable product attribute is highlighted, coupled with the certainty that it will be delivered with the product.
Message structure = how product information is communicated. Presenting arguments first may increase consumer attention and processing intensity, while presenting them last may benefit them because they are most recently activated in memory. Other relevant message variables are:
One-sided message = classic, biased ad with arguments supporting a conclusion favourable to the advertised brand. Two-sided advertisements = include both positive and negative, or supporting and counterarguments. One-sided messages are more persuasive when recipients are favourably disposed to the message issue, while two-sided messages are more effective when the issue is unfamiliar/unfavourable to consumers.
Argument-based advertisements appeal to reason and use arguments, while affect-based advertisements use emotions and feelings. Experiential products lend themselves well to affect-based appeals. These appeals are also useful in low-involvement purchases. Fear-arousing communications try to scare the consumer into action by referring to risks that the consumer can either prevent or reduce by (not) buying the product. Risks can be:
Source and message variables are the first class in advertising. Second class of situational variables that may affect consumer responses are the communication tools that make up the promotional mix. This includes direct marketing, interactive marketing, sales promotion, PR, and personal selling. Integrated Marketing Communication = coordinating the elements in the promotion mix to create synergy between them. Advertising can no longer be viewed as invariably non-personal communication, but manifests itself in hybrid forms, including elements from other tools in the promotion mix.
In direct marketing the firm directly and individually communicates with a potential customer, with the objective of generating a behavioural response. It includes database management, telemarketing, and direct response advertising. Word-of-mouth marketing = when a product user tries to convince others to try the product as well.
In event marketing, events are used to get in touch with potential customers, often through sponsorship. Direct mail = a personalized form where consumers are typically addressed by their names.
Interactive marketing = using the potential of the internet for marketing products and services. Advantages of the internet are that it is fast, that consumers can control timing and pacing of information, and that consumers may have more control of content than with traditional media. However, perceived social presence is lower online.
Sales promotion = focused on generating an immediate behavioural response from the consumer. It is a form of ‘action communication’. It uses price-cuts and other forms of temporary incentives to generate sales on an ad hoc basis. Its five basic functions are:
Negative effects may occur as sales promotion actions by competitors result in ever-increasing promotion costs for similar sales revenues. Sales promotions may affect the reference price and make consumers reject the offer when the promotion has ended. Price becomes the most salient product attribute in the consumer’s mind, corroding perceptions based on other features.
Public relations = a communication instrument that is used to promote favourable perceptions about the organization as a whole. It includes sponsoring of events, communication with media gatekeepers, political stakeholders, pressure groups, government bodies and internal employees. It is a form of communication creating a mutual understanding between organizations and their publics. Financial PR = aimed at informing and persuading the financial audiences with are essential for the long-term money-raising potential of the company, such as shareholders and investors. Marketing PR = the promotion of new products and services through free publicity.
Personal selling = a two-way, face-to-face form of communication to inform and persuade prospective buyers with the aim of yielding a behavioural response from them. An agent tries to foster compliance from a target.
Persuasion involves changing consumer beliefs and evaluative responses, while compliance is focused solely on overt behaviour and compliance following a request.
Key advantage: it has a higher overall impact on buyer behaviour than many of the other tools, since a sales person can probe symptoms of consumer resistance and try to break through them. The product can be demonstrated and there can be negotiated on the sales terms. There is no waste in reaching audience members that are not part of the target group. Personal selling is relatively expensive and has a limited reach and frequency. There is also a high risk of message inconsistency.
Two approaches to conceptualize the impact of advertising: Modelling approach = focuses on the aggregate level; entire markets/market segments are the primary unit of measurement. Behavioural paradigm = focuses on individual consumer responses as a function of specific advertising input variables (ad variables = independent, consumer responses = dependent). The level of specificity is high in the behavioural paradigm such that the effects of individual ad characteristics on specific individual consumer responses are assessed by employing experimental research methods.
Sales-response models = aim to relate advertising inputs such as expenditures to aggregated output measures like sales and market share, in order to gain insight in the aggregated advertising effects as a function of aggregated advertising input. Two basic shapes are:
Disadvantages of an aggregate level of analysis are that advertising may not be the only causal factor, variables may interact, and factors outside the realm of the company may be responsible for aggregated effects. Response modelling is based on input-output representations without regard for the underlying processes that are responsible for the occurrence of a relationship between advertising input and sales output. Sales output is a behavioural measure and thus a behavioural approach is needed to complement the modelling approach in understanding advertising effects.
Hierarchy-of-effects models propose several intermediate steps instead of assuming a direct link between ad message and consumer response. It is assumed that some form of consumer learning takes place following exposure to advertising.
There are three learning stages:
AIDA model = advertising reaches its impact on consumer behaviour through the sequence of Attention (cognitive stage), Interest, Desire (affective stage), and Action (conative stage). The two basic functions of advertising are to inform and to persuade. Modifications:
None of the models provide a valid description of how advertising works. Other weaknesses are that in many situations the model will not hold because the fixed sequence of processes presupposes a high level of consumer involvement, while this is rather an exception than the rule.
FCB grid = advertising can be modelled along two key variables: the extent of thinking versus feeling and the extent of consumer involvement (low versus high).
High involvement |
Houses, loans, credit cards, cars |
Sports cars, designer glasses, jewellery | ||||
Low involvement |
Detergents, shampoo, toilet paper |
Candy, snacks, lemonade | ||||
| Think | Feel |
Rossiter et al. grid = high and low involvement product types are crossed with two classes of consumer motives. Positive motivations are transformational motivations and include sensory gratification, intellectual stimulation, and social approval (a consumer who craves milk because he likes the taste). Negative purchase motivations are informational motives and include problem removal, problem avoidance and normal depletion (a consumer who notices he has run out of milk and wants to buy a new bottle).
A weakness of both the FCB grid and the Rossiter et al. grid is that they link certain levels of involvement and motivation to certain products, and thus disregard the possibility that the same product may function in a different role for different individuals. Involvement and motivation refer to person variables, not to invariant attributes of a product/advertising stimulus.
DAGMAR = more explicit with regard to the specific communication objectives that advertising may have in each stage. It highlights a basic distinction in evaluative versus non-evaluative consumer responses to advertising.
Non-evaluative responses:
Evaluative responses:
There is no evidence that advertising affects the consumer in the sequence posited by the model.
Problems with all the hierarchy-of-effects models mentioned above:
Consumer behaviour and psychology in general are too complex to be captured in a single model.
Cognitive response model = shares with the various hierarchy-of-effects model the assumption that learning takes place in response to exposure to a persuasive message. However, it emphasizes the mediating role of idiosyncratic thoughts/cognitive responses that people generate when being exposed. Once a receiver is exposed to a persuasive message, he may actively add to and elaborate upon message content. Cognitive responding may lead to persuasion, active resistance, or a neutral, unchanged position. Major shortcoming: its failure to account for the processes that occur when ability and/or motivation are low, other than that the extent and valence of thoughts are less consequential for persuasion.
Dual process approach = information processing, judgement and decision-making must be viewed on a continuum. At one end of this continuum, information processing is characterized by controlled, slow, explicit, conscious, and analytic, bottom-up processing and judgement. People spend time scrutinizing the advertising message and construct meaning, beliefs, attitudes, judgement, and behavioural decisions. This mode of processing is engaged when the issue in a message is highly involving for the consumer. The quality of information becomes an important determinant of persuasion. Strong, compelling arguments evoke mostly favourable thoughts which will increase persuasion.
On the other end of the continuum, information processing involves relatively automatic, fast, impulsive, top-down processing and judgement. Consumers use prior knowledge, simple decision rules (heuristics), stereotypes and other quick guidelines to effortlessly and mindlessly arrive at a decision.
Attitudes formed/changed this way are less persistent, do not predict behaviour very well, and are vulnerable to counter-persuasion. Intermediate forms are highly likely. Both modes complement each other and may even interact.
Activating a concept in consumer memory (priming) can directly affect overt behaviour without the participant being consciously aware that the activation procedure has any influence on the subsequent behavioural response. Subliminal priming = when people are not even consciously aware of the stimulus, but still show even complex behaviour as a function of the stimulus that is largely involuntary and automatic. Because of the low-involvement nature of most advertising, implicit processes are the rule rather than the exception when it comes to understanding the psychology of advertising.
Consumer psychology concerns itself with the psychological antecedents, processes and consequences involved in the acquisition, use and disposal of products and services by consumers. Social cognition focuses on the way cognitive and affective processes are affected by, and influence, social behaviour. Consumers acquire, represent and encode advertising information in four stages:
Automatic, non-conscious processes are more influential during stage 1 and 2. Reflective, conscious processes play an important role during stage 3 and 4. Involvement determines the allocation of resources needed for (non)focal attention, thereby influencing how consumers proceed through the stages. Outcome-relevant involvement = the extent to which the acquisition and use of a product is deemed to have personal consequences for the consumer. This is determined by factors like price and consumer goals.
Information acquisition frequently involves only little higher-order cognitive activity (a consumer may only glance a second at an ad) and is often automatic and non-conscious. This type of preattentive processing results in storage of information in implicit memory. Implicit memory effects occur when the consumer has been exposed to a stimulus previously and involve information processing that is fast, parallel and effortless. Explicit memory = a person’s conscious recollection of facts/events.
Preattentive processing mainly relies on feature analysis = quick analysis of the environment for basic familiarity and significance.
It implies that the memory trace produced through exposure to an advertisement only contains information on the perceptual features/design of the ad and not on its meaning. Product choice is only affected by an ad if the product looks identical to the ad. Otherwise it won’t be recognized and thus there is no future influence.
Preattentive processing can also include conceptual processing, resulting in a semantic analysis = analysing the advertised product, capturing its meaning (what is it and what does it do?).
Advantage: an advertisement can influence future choice, even if the consumer is presented at the point of choice with a representation of the product that is perceptually different from the product in the ad.
Hemispheric lateralization = our brain hemispheres have evolved specialized processing units for specific types of information. Picture processing involves higher activation levels of the right hemisphere since that hemisphere is tailored towards more holistic, impressionistic processing. Picture advertisements should be placed in the left visual field. Text advertisements should be placed on the right.
Matching activation hypothesis = when one hemisphere is activated by the information that accommodates the processing style of that particular hemisphere, the other one is encouraged to elaborate on secondary material. Thus when advertisements are not consciously attended to, but happen to be placed in such a position that they can be easily processed by the unused hemisphere, such exposure may result in increased conscious processing.
Preattentive analysis can also result in instant and non-conscious generation of emotions, in particular negative ones. When an urgency signal is induced unconsciously, fear and anxiety are the result, presumably prompting the organism to take immediate action to reduce the threat. Offering a remedy to remove the threat, e.g. buying the product, is then important for advertising effectiveness.
Hedonic fluency = the subjective ease with which a stimulus can be perceived and processed. This fluency can be based on:
Stimuli that have been encountered before, have been stored in memory and are more easily processed (familiarity). When an ad is encountered incidentally, a subsequent conscious exposure produces hedonic fluency as a result of the previous exposure. Result: a positive affect which is misattributed to the focal ad, producing more favourable consumer responses.
(Non)focal consumer attention can be directed outward toward ads and brands presented in the consumer’s environment, or inward toward product-related information already stored in memory. Hedonic fluency may play a role in both types of processes.
Exposure to sequences of unrelated ads may affect consumer judgement as a function of the compatibility of the goals that the ads activate. If the goal of the target ad and the prime ad are compatible, the target ad produces more favourable evaluations than when the goals mismatch. This effect occurs because the goal activated by the priming ad increases the ease of processing of the target ad, if that ad serves the same self-regulatory goals as the priming ad.
This goal fluency results in positive affect that is misattributed to the focal ad and brand resulting in more favourable evaluations and intentions.
Question-behaviour effect = simply measuring behavioural intensions increases the likelihood of people actually performing that behaviour. Asking about some behaviour renders the attitude toward that behaviour more accessible and when that attitude is positive, the behaviour becomes more likely. Response fluency = asking questions about behaviour increases the hedonic fluency of the response to the questions, making perceptions at the time when the behaviour might be performed more easily, positively affecting the likelihood of that behaviour.
Conscious information processing involves focal attention, and is facilitated when consumer involvement turns from low to moderate. Because short-term memory has a limited capacity, consumers select only a few stimuli to pay attention to. Therefore special features are needed that make stimuli stand out. Three classes of stimuli featured attract involuntary consumer attention: salience, vividness and novelty.
Salience = the extent to which a stimulus is noticeably different from its environment. Ways to emphasize this difference are using humour or changing the camera angle used to focus on the target product. Figure-ground principle = figural stimuli become focal whereas non-figural stimuli become non-focal. It captures the process by which stimuli can grab attention and everything else fades into the background. Salience effects are moderated by the extent to which individuals are motivated to process information: they should be at a maximum when processing motivation is low and vice versa.
Vivid stimuli are emotionally interesting, concrete and image-provoking, and proximate in a sensory temporal or spatial way. Vividness = a function of characteristics of the perceiver, or of the advertising stimulus itself. Concrete and image-provoking information in ads may be perceived and processed differently, depending on the extent to which the perceiver has a high or low intrinsic tendency to engage in visual imagery. High visualizers are more sensitive to vivid executional elements in advertising.
A key factor driving a consumer perception of newness (novelty) is the extent to which product information is unfamiliar and disconfirms existing consumer expectancies. Surprise mobilizes cognitive resources that are used to resolve the inconsistency between what was expected and what is actually encountered. Unexpected information results in extended causal reasoning, counterfactual thinking, and cognitive elaboration.
Expectancy disconfirmation model = consumers form expectancies about product performance before buying a product. These are in large part shaped by advertising. After purchase, they compare the actual product with their expectations. Advertisers are confronted with the dilemma between selling more due to unrealistic promising while disappointing customers and selling less but being honest to them.
Categorization = the process by which incoming information is classified: labelled as belonging to one or more categories based on a comparative assessment of features of the category and the incoming information.
The success of brand extensions depends largely on whether consumers categorize them as congruent with the parent brand or its associations.
Representativeness heuristic = the extent to which two stimuli are deemed to belong to the same overall category based on shared similarities. This might be used to predict whether consumers categorize a new product as a true innovation or perceive it as similar to existing products.
Another view is that moderate dissimilarity may benefit a brand extension because people sometimes take pleasure in solving moderate incongruities. The associated pleasure may be transferred to the focal brand which is then evaluated better.
Categorization effects also exist on individual products. The extent to which a product is prototypical for a category, influences product liking (prototypical products are often liked better than less prototypical ones). However, prototypicality may not serve the brand in terms of advertising salience, where communicating contrast between the focal brand and competitors is pivotal. Pioneering advantage = pioneering a novel category and becoming the most prototypical representative of that category. The pioneer decides on what attributes competitors are judged, and competitors are judged on those attributes only after the pioneer, creating a winning situation for the pioneer.
Assimilation = objects are classified as more similar to the parent category than they really are when the object and category are perceived as more congruent. Contrast implies a reverse phenomenon. The perception of attributes of the object can change in the direction of features of the parent category when assimilation occurs. Assimilation occurs when information is made salient, which can be included in the parent category.
As the perception of the category member can change when it is viewed in context of the parent category, so too can the perception of the parent category when viewed in context of a new member. This happens with brand extensions. The extent to which the new product affects the associations and beliefs of the parent category, again depends on the similarity of the new product to the parent category.
A specific type of categorization occurs when not just products or brands are categorized, but product or brand users as a function of associations related to a parent brand category. Aaker: brands can have different personalities like people. The brand personality scale consists of 5 dimensions: sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, and ruggedness.
Stimulus-based impression formation = salient stimulus information guides the impression formation process (e.g. inferences consumers make about someone who wears expensive clothes or who is sitting at the terrace of a golf club versus someone wearing cheap clothes and going to a cheap restaurant).
Memory-based consumer impression formation = assessing how firms can overcome the impact of negative versus positive initial consumer impressions about a brand. Impressions based on negative initial information are less amenable than those based on positive information. However, presenting new, or updating information influences the chances of correcting the initial impressions. Comparative information motivates recall of previous information and careful processing of the new information. When the initial impression was negative, a comparative format would motivate increased weighting of this negative information, compared to a non-comparative format resulting in less positive adjusted impressions than when no comparisons were made in the new information.
After preattentive analysis and focal attention, the process of acquiring, representing and encoding information from advertising also entails a phase of comprehension. This is essential for achieving persuasion and should be an important factor in advertising effectiveness. Truth effect = people’s tendency to initially uncritically accept information, even when certain elements are not fully comprehended.
Believing a message appears to be the default, low effort response and critically reappraising a conclusion is a second step not taken automatically. When processing resources are limited, believing becomes the default option and rejection the correction response. It is harder to reject than to accept an advertising claim, even when we know or are informed that the claim is false. In a cluttered media environment where information is constantly competing for our attention, conditions arise that resemble interruption condition: consumers tend to make decisions quickly and as effortlessly as possible and when distracted by too many competing messages they are less able to engage in the extra effort needed for disbelieving claims that have initially been accepted even though they were false.
Repetition increases familiarity which increases believability. Even repeatedly highlighting that a claim is false may not undo the truth effect.
Sleeper effect = repetition increases familiarity for the claim itself, fostering the perception that it is true, whereas it decreases memory for the original context of the claim (the message that the claim is false).
Pragmatic inferences = simple assumptions about statements that are literally true, but figuratively false à “Heineken is the best beer in the world”.
Ad slogans sometimes omit comparison information, with consumers frequently providing the missing information without being fully aware that they are doing so often in the direction desired by marketers à “Dentists advise brand X toothpaste”: two or a hundred dentists?
Juxtaposition = facilitates certain (sometimes false) inferences à “Be cool, buy brand X”, there is not really a causal relationship.
Affirmation of the consequent = hinges on reversing cause and effect à “If you can see it, you can make it”, implying that consumers can build anything they can imagine.
The previous examples of miscomprehension fall halfway between comprehension and elaborative reasoning. The truth effect may be the result of processes that are largely outside conscious consumer awareness, and some of the inferences that consumers make on the basis of sometimes misleading advertising claims as well. Inferences made during the final stage of elaborative reasoning require full consciousness. Hence, elaborative consumer reasoning is facilitated when consumer involvement is high. Elaborative reasoning is about thinking and thinking can vary along at least three dimensions: the extent of thinking, the valence of thinking and the object of thinking. The present view will focus on the object of thinking:
Self-schema = cognitive generalization about the self that is comprised of a more or less comprehensive set of traits, values and beliefs that exerts a powerful influence on information processing. Product information contained in advertising that is congruent with a salient self-schema motivates consumers to process the information in more detail.
Information processing with regard to the self increases the extent of elaborative reasoning, for example when processing strong arguments with regard to the self, although these effects can be offset when processing motivation is reduced or when information processing reaches a satiation point and irritation sets in. A salient self-schema can bias information processing in line with the schema, frequently in order to protect or enhance the self.
Elaborative reasoning can result in either increased or decreased persuasion as a result of the quality of the argumentation in the ad the consumer is exposed to. Then the train of thought might move the consumer away from the advocated position.
A specific type of elaborative reasoning occurs when the object of consumer thoughts is not the product, ad or brand, but the thoughts themselves. Meta-cognition = when people reflect on their own inner states, and infer something from that process. Consumers thinking about the motives of marketers and the misattribution of hedonic fluency, can be considered meta-cognitive experiences, since they are judgements that are based on how they perceive information and the extent and direction to which they think about their own judgement and evaluation processes and those of others.
Marketplace meta-cognition = people’s beliefs about their own mental states and the mental states, strategies, of others as these pertain directly to the social domain of marketplace interactions.
Ease of retrieval = the apparent ease with which product and brand related information can be retrieved from memory. It is a form of hedonic fluency. Information that is easy to retrieve may positively affect product attitudes because people may conclude that what they can easily remember must be correct.
So when a consumer is asked to think of 10 reasons why he should buy a BMW and finds this difficult, his attitude towards BMW is less favourable than when he only has to come up with one reason, which is easier. Meta-cognition is often influential in consumer judgement because consumers appear to consider these inferences as diagnostic and trustworthy.
Self-validation = the confidence consumers have in their thoughts and evaluations in response to persuasive messages. Increasing consumer confidence in positive thoughts and high credible sources enhance advertisement effectiveness and vice versa.
Human memory = a system that not only allows us to record, store and retrieve the information we acquire, but influences the way this information is perceived, stored and encoded as well. Encoding = the processes involved in getting the information into the system by transforming an external stimulus into an internal representation, which allows us to retain it in the cognitive system. Storage = information retention over time. You can be able to retrieve this information from your memory, or forget it.
The Atkinson and Shiffrin model consists of three parts: sensory memory, working/short-term memory, and long-term memory. Information is first held briefly in the sensory memory, then a selection is transferred to the short-term memory, and afterwards an even smaller selection is stored in the long-term memory.
Sensory memory stores should be considered part of the perception process, because the stored information is not yet encoded, but stored in the sensory modality in which it has been perceived. In the working memory, input from the different sensory memories is integrated with information from long-term memory to be briefly held in conscious awareness and manipulated. New information can only access when old information is moved out. Verbal rehearsal lengthens the period for which information stays in the short-term store and at the same time builds up the trace in the long-term memory. When rehearsing information and paying attention to the information, the likelihood of storage in the long-term memory increases. Long-term memory stores nearly unlimited amounts of information for an unlimited period of time.
Baddeley’s major evidence for the multi-systems view of memory:
Levels of processing: items are remembered better the more we pay attention to them and the more deeply they are processed.
Baddeley and Hitch replaced the model of working memory as a unitary system by a multi-component working memory model. A controlling attentional system, the central executive, which has no storage capacity of its own, supervises and coordinates a number of subsystems. Two subsystems are:
The central executive allocates attention and coordinates the two subsystems. Its main task is planning sequences of activities. It cannot store information, so there is an episodic buffer = a place where information from long-term memory and the subsystems of working memory can be temporarily stored, integrated and manipulated. This is where the consumer consideration set can be found.
The most important distinction of components of the long-term memory is between forms of conscious and non-conscious memory. Conscious forms are declarative, explicit, or recollective. Non-conscious forms has been referred to as implicit memory.
Declarative or explicit memory = characterized by a person’s conscious recollection of facts or events. Subcategories are:
Free recall test = respondents who previously learned a list of words, are asked to recall as many of them possible. Recognition test = respondents are presented with a list with words they learned before, and some that have not presented before.
Implicit memory effects occur when previous experiences facilitate our performance of subsequent tasks without us remembering the previous experience or being aware of its influence on our performance. In measures of implicit memory instructions refer only to the task at hand and make no reference to prior experiences:
Incidental ad exposure should result in implicit memory, whereas the content of ads to which we pay attention should be stored in explicit memory is reminiscent of the levels of processing assumption.
Priming = the phenomenon that exposure to an object or a word in one context increases the accessibility of the mental representation of that object/word in a person’s mind.
As a result, the activated concept exerts for some time unintended influence on the individual’s responses in subsequent unrelated contexts without the individual being aware of this influence. This conception of priming implies the existence of concepts within memory that represent familiar objects/words. When the object/word is presented, this representation will be activated/primed.
Priming is considerably reduced or even absent when the target material is in presented auditory form or when participants study pictorial equivalents of words. Priming cannot only increase the accessibility of single concrete lexical memory location corresponding to the stimulus word, but can activate abstract trait concepts too. Example: when you present respondents with negative terms and then ask them to perceive someone’s behaviour, they will tend to be more negative than when they have been presented with positive terms upfront.
Subliminal priming = the participant is exposed to the priming stimuli as part of a conscious task. The stimuli are presented at such a brief exposure that participants remain unaware that any stimulus has been presented. To ensure that the prime stimulus does not linger on in the short-term memory and thus be recognized despite the brief exposure, presentation of the priming stimulus is immediately followed by a letter string, a so-called post mask. The finding that subliminal presentation of words or pictures can prime mental representations of words of objects in a person’s mind raises the possibility that such procedures could be used effectively in advertising.
To be stored in long-term memory, our perceptions of stimuli and events need to be interpreted and encoded into some form of cognitive representation. We succeed in the encoding task by relating the stimulus to previous knowledge, by recognizing that the stimulus belongs to a particular category (e.g. a product category like cars). Once we have assigned an object to a category, we make inferences about its functions, which go far beyond our perception.
Classical view of representing categories as a set of defining features: people abstract category prototypes from their experience with different category members and then classify exemplars on the basis of their similarity to the prototype.
Scripts = abstract knowledge structures that describe standardized sequences of events and the interrelationship between different categories.
Example: knowing that the waiter in a restaurant is the one who serves food and who you can ask for the bill, while relying on the restaurant script.
Associative network models = conceive of mental representations of each isolated piece of knowledge as a discrete node connected to other nodes by links of various types. Each concept/attribute is represented by a node. When looking at our knowledge about drinks, there will be nodes for soft drinks, juices, beers, etc. but also for attributes like sweet, tasty, etc. When a node is activated because it is actively though about, the activation of nodes spreads to other nodes via the links. If an individual is primed with the word ‘sweet’, the activation would spread to all the concepts connected to this feature. The more activated a node is, the more likely it will burst into awareness, be recalled, or be applied to incoming information.
One of the standard strategies to measure the effectiveness of an advertising campaign is to contact consumers, who were exposed to the ad and ask them what they remember about the ad or the advertised product (recall test). They can also be shown the advertisements and asked whether the recognize it (recognition test).
It is false to assume that people’s product judgements should be related to their recollecton o the evidence on which those judgements are presumably based. Using only recall or recognition measures might result in an underestimation of the impact of a campaign on memory because exposure to advertisements can impact on implicit memory and these effects may not be detectable with measures of explicit memory. Also, recollection of arguments made in a campaign may be unrelated to consumers’ attitude towards the advertised product, because the targets of advertising campaigns may change their product judgements online, while being exposed to the campaign. Then they might be influenced by arguments, even if they cannot remember them, or they might still remember arguments, even though they considered them invalid.
Incidental exposure is likely to leave a trace on implicit memory. Assessing the impact of a campaign on memory, whether implicit or explicit, is not an adequate measure of the effectiveness of an advertisement campaign. The aim of such campaigns is to change consumer attitude towards the product in order to increase the probability that they will buy it.
Thus, attitude change achieved by a campaign, rather than memory for arguments contained in the advertisements should be the indicator on which an evaluation of campaign effectiveness should be based. The change in attitudes achieved by a communication is often unrelated to the arguments that are remembered.
In many situations, we are presented with information, which motivates us to form our judgement at the time we are taking in the information. People integrate the information they receive immediately into an overall evaluation. Once the impression has been formed, there is little purpose for them to remember all the traits on which their impression has been based.
When reading advertisements about brands of a product we are planning to buy, we will probably form an opinion while reading the information. We will not remember all the advantages and disadvantages later on because we were focused on certain attributes. Thus, when we make online judgements, integrating the information while we are exposed to it, our evaluations can be relatively unrelated to the product claims, even though we will still be able to recall them at some later time. If we had no intention of buying the product, but a friend would ask us to advise him, our judgement would be more memory-based.
Carlston: individuals store both the original information about the attributes of the products (attribute-based representation) as well as their evaluations based on this elaboration (evaluation-based representation) in separate representations. Each of these may be used independently in subsequent judgements. An evaluation-based representation is retrieved for use in making subsequent global memory-based judgements, whereas an attribute-based representation is retrieved for use in making subsequent discrete memory-based judgements. Since global judgements predict purchase intentions, measures of memory for descriptive information are poor measures of advertising effectiveness.
Consumers rarely consider all brands they are aware of, but base their purchase decision on their consideration set = the set of brands brought to mind in a particular choice situation. The focus is on cognitive accessibility of a brand name as determinant of brand consideration and brand choice.
Purchase situations can encourage more memory-based or more stimulus-based strategies. Buying a car (e.g. choosing to go to a Peugeot dealer) is typically a memory-based decision. Cognitive accessibility influences the composition of the consideration set of car dealers to go to. Shopping in a supermarket with a shopping list is more stimulus-based. Cognitive accessibility will influence the consideration set because highly accessible brands are more familiar.
Priming a brand name increases the cognitive accessibility of that brand name. With totally unfamiliar brand names, priming can increase liking by increasing processing fluency. Priming can also increase the accessibility of closely associated brands and of the product category to which the brand belongs. This is most likely to happen if the brand is prototypical for the product category and if that particular category was previously not highly accessible in the individual’s mind. By reminding people that there is an attractive but non-obvious choice alternative, some are likely to choose this alternative, which they would not have thought of unaided.
The set of brands consumers consider when deciding on a purchase is typically not only smaller than the total number of brands available in the marketplace but also than the number of brands of which the consumer is aware. Priming that requires a greater degree of conceptual elaboration is more effective for memory-based choices but less effective when choice is stimulus-based. Increasing accessibility of a brand name through priming is likely to influence only the inclusion of a brand in the consideration set rather than the purchase decision. Priming can also influence this decision when:
The passage of time is not the only reason why we forget things. Forgetting is also influenced by our experiences in the period between exposure to information and recall. Retroactive interference = when interpolated learning interferes with the recall of the original material. Learning nonsense syllables after meaningful adjectives results in much less interference than learning synonyms. Proactive interference = when what we have learnt earlier interferes with later learning. Advertising clutter = the extent to which messages compete for the consumer’s attention.
Several factors should moderate the impact of competitive interference on memory:
In order to combat interference due to advertising clutter, marketers use retrieval cues, ad repetition or place the ad in an advantageous position within the block of advertisements.
Advertising presented after experiencing a product can distort consumers’ memory of their experience. People experience what they expect to experience, at least with products that are not easily evaluated. The effect of advertisements shown afterwards reflects a distortion of individuals’ memories of their evaluation, involving some form of selective retrieval, with possibly a reinterpretation of the retrieved evidence in the light of the ad claims. Post-experience memory distortions are more likely to occur for (rather ambiguous) experience and credence product attributes than for search attributes. People who are familiar with a product and confident in their ability to judge the quality of that product, are unlikely to be susceptible to the distorting influence of advertising messages.
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Advertisement Bhupender contributed on 08-09-2021 17:52
Disadvantages of an aggregate level of analysis are that advertising may not be the only causal factor, variables may interact, and factors outside the realm of the company may be responsible for aggregated effects. Response modelling is based on input-output representations without regard for the underlying processes that are responsible for the occurrence of a relationship between advertising input and sales output. Sales output is a behavioural measure and thus a behavioural approach is needed to complement the modelling approach in understanding advertising effects.
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