Lecture notes with Psychology of Advertising at Leiden University - 2017/2018

Week 1

What are the changes in the lectures?

• In this course the focus lies on the persuasion function: forming, strengthening or changing attitudes through advertising.
• In this lecture the four stages of processing advertising are explained and for each stage there are different models and stimuli. The nowadays way of advertising is more effective, because influencing emotions works better than having to process all the information.
• ABC effect stands for affect, behaviour and cognition.
• Perceptual fluency: the things that are, for example, are easier to read feel more flued. Fluency gives a more positive feeling and also contribute this feeling to the brand.
• Focal attention face.
• Salient stimulus: are different from environment, it’s context and therefore possibly interesting.

Which topics are treated in the lecture that aren't treated in the literature?

• Everything that's been said in the lecture can also be found in the literature.

Which things are important for the exam?

• It is important to know what the four different stages of processing advertisement are and what models and other defenitions belong to those stages.

Week 2

What are the changes in the lectures?

• Lecture 2 this year was lecture 3 last year. This lecture is all about attitudes, what the are, how they are formed and what influence it has on our behaviour.

Which topics are treated in the lecture that aren't treated in the literature?

• This part is not mentioned in the lecture: Haddock researched attitudes about Tony Blair, like attitudes about BMW verses Mercedes. These had the same results, except for the fact that people assume that there must not be that many negative attributes, only when an attitude is weak or ambivalent beforehand.
• Not only music, but scent can unconsciously influence behaviour such as being in the store longer, having a good feeling, and buying behaviour.  
• Study from Morales et al., 2007 not mentioned in the book (implicit attitude: cookies and sanitary napkins)
• Study from Priester et al., 2004 not mentioned in the book (attitude strength)
• Study from Dardis et al., 2015 (game performance and brand attitude)

Which things are important for the exam?

• What you need to know for the exam about attitudes: Definitions, characteristics, how they are formed, functions and the predictors/consequences of attitude strength.

Week 3

What are the changes in the lectures?

• This was lecture 2 last year. In this lecture there is a brief overview of how the memory works and the relevance for advertising succes (and failure).
• Extra topics:
  • Memory is involved in all steps of the DAGMAR model. It records, stores, and retrieves information. It also influences perception, encoding, and storage.
  • Priming is the phenomena that exposure to an object or a word in one situation has an influence on the evaluation, behaviour or your memory in a different situation. This is done unconsciously.
  • Jacoby's, 1983, study about Implicit and explicit measurements. What it showed that with context the memory for explicit measurement the memory increased, but for implicit it was worse. If you provide context, it is good for explicit memory but not implicit.
  • Supraliminal primes: people are unaware of the connection between the stimulus and their behaviour.
  • Subliminal primes: people are unaware of the stimulus.

Which topics are treated in the lecture that aren't treated in the literature?

• Everything that's been said in the lecture can also be found in the literature.

Which things are important for the exam?

• Baddely & Hitch (1974): you don’t have to know the whole model. What you need to know about it is that this model is a combination of what crack said about attention being the important thing en what Atkinson & Shiffrin (1968) said about the separate systems. That this model shows an interaction between attention and the systems.

Week 4

What are the changes in the lectures?

• New topics:
  • David Ogivly: a good campaign comes out of good research.
  • Bill Bernbach: Logic and over-analysis can immobilize and sterilize an idea. It's like love; the more you analyze it, the faster it disappears.
  • The three secret ingredients of a great campaing Im-Re-Gel: impact, relevance, Geloofwaardig (credibility).

Which topics are treated in the lecture that aren't treated in the literature?

• Everything that's been said in the lecture can also be found in the literature.

Which things are important for the exam?

• Massclusivity: light buyers are more important than heavy buyers. The lecturer said that it was a good idea to make an exam question about this.
• Three qualities to become a succefull advertiser: curiosity, stamina, upside down thinking

Week 5

What are the changes in the lectures?

• For thought listing techniques, systematic processing is required.

Which topics are treated in the lecture that aren't treated in the literature?

• The part about the second screen is not in the book.

Which things are important for the exam?

• What theories of persuasion entail: McGuire model, Cognitive response model, Dual process theories
• You need to know the thought listing technique.
• You need to know how processing ability and motivation influence persuasion and what message strategies exist to overcome resistance to persuasion.

Week 6 

Attitude-Intention-Behaviour

Decisions can be made automatic, uncontrolled, effortless, fast, unconscious and heuristic or reflective, controlled, effortfull, slow, conscious and systematic.

The principle of compatibility means that measures of attitudes will only be related to measures of behavior if both constructs are assessed at the same level of generality. General attitudes predict general behavior and specific attitudes predict specific behavior. Attitudes toward safe sex does not predict condom use well, but attitudes toward condom use does predict condom use well.

The theory of planned behavior: behavior is caused by behavioral intention, which is caused by attitudes toward behavior, subjective norms and perceived behavioral control. Behavioral beliefs and evaluation of behavioral outcomes influence attitudes toward behavior. Normative beliefs and motivation to comply influence subjective norms. Control beliefs and perceived power influence perceived behavioral control.

The standard model can be extended with anticipated regret and identity similarity. This is the extent to which performing and behavior would be consistent with people’s self-concept and thus serve their self-expression goals. The postcode lottery provides non-players with feedback about what they would have won, had they played the lottery. When one does not play and one’s postcode is drawn, one knows that one would have won, had one played the lottery. This particular feedback is absent in most lotteries. This causes a lot of regret.

Behavioral intention is: I intend to do, while implementation intention is: I intend to do in this situation. By specifying time and situational context in which behavior should be performed, people remember their intention better, when the encounter the situation in which to act. It increases the association between situational cues and the response is instrumental for obtaining the goal.

Aarts, Dijksterhuis and Midden investigated cognitive and behavioral effects of forming implementations intentions. People were asked to attain an new goal by interrupting an mundane behavior. Some people enriched their goal with implementation intentions, while others did not. All participants were told the same location to go to. Half of the people were asked to plan how to spend a coupon and the other half how to collect it. Then they had to do a lexical decision task. The conclusion is that planning leads to more collected coupons, because the people were more likely to be reminded by the situational cues to perform the action. This was about plan to act.

Planning to resist can be done by identifying situations in which the risk of yielding to the target temptation is particularly high. Also, when thinking of a coping response that is likely to be effective in helping to resist the temptation and cognitively rehearsing to link this coping response to the situation. Effectiveness is dependent on remembering the coping response at the right time and whether the response is effective in resisting the temptation.

The goal is to target the main driver of behavior, which can be attitudes. Perceived benefits can be increased and perceived costs can be decreased. Subjective norms could also be the main driver, which can be dealt with by providing desirable social norms. Perceived behavioral control can be dealt with by increasing perceived control.

Automaticity of Behaviour

Automatic processes are processes that occur without intention, effort or awareness and do not interfere with other concurrent cognitive processes. Attitudes, norms, goals and behavior can be primed by the environment and by other people’s social and physical behavior. People aren’t aware of the influence of the prime.

The function of perception is doing. Tucker and Ellis researched automated behavioral tendencies. When we see an object, possible behavioral tendencies are automatically activated. Reaction time for pushing a button is less, when pushing the left button and the object is right and the other way around. People also make less mistakes in this case. Brain areas associated with grasping are activated by an object that you can grasp. Images of food activate brain areas associated with taste.

Perception-Behavior link

The basic premise is that stereotypes about groups are represented in memory and that they include a set of traits, among other things. When stereotypes are activated, all of the traits are activated too. So one should get trait-consistent behavior, when primed with a stereotype. When people are primed with the elderly, they tend to walk slower to the elevator. The priming can be done with scrambled sentence task, in which a person has to unscramble a sentence with prime words, bingo.

The chameleon effect can be researched in the following manor: a person interacts with two confederates in two different sessions, in which they describe photo’s. Confederate one shakes his foot and the second touches his face a lot. The test subject tends to react to this, by copying the behavior. People are like frogs and chameleons, because perception always activates behavioral tendencies.

Automatic norm activation

Norms are knowledge-based beliefs, shaped by social influence and triggered by social cues. They are if-then rules that state that in certain situations individuals should behave according to the social norm. social norms might guide behavior automatically, without individuals being aware of their influence. When people are primed with a library in a lexical decision task, they tend to respond later to silence words. They also pronounce words less loudly. When primed with a restaurant, people tend to display more well-mannered eating behavior.

Automatic goal activation

In the next experiment, the goal-priming manipulation is people completing a word puzzle task with words, that were either related or unrelated to achieving. In the next task it was measured if people continued with a scrabble task, after they were told to stop. People primed with achieving, do continue more often.

In this experiment, the goal-priming manipulation is people doing the scrambled sentence task, with half primed with the importance to achieve and the other half with the importance of helping. It was measured to what extent people helped others with puzzles. The helping prime causes people to help more often.

Cues in the environment lead to consistent behavior: effects of scent and music

In this experiment, people filled out a questionnaire in a small room with a bucket of water and cleaner or without. Then they perform a lexical decision task and a taste test with toast. In a lexical decision task, people have to indicate as quick and accurate as possible whether strings of letters are words or not. A faster reaction time for target words is an indication of accessibility of the concept. This experiment shows that scent activates related concepts and behaviors. If there is a bucket of water and cleaner in the room, people tend to clean their crumbs more after eating the toast. In-store music affects product choice, like French music causes people to buy more French wine. Music also activates related knowledge.

Hidden persuaders: unconscious processes

Vicary claimed to have significant effects due to subliminal advertising, but later admitted that his study was fabricated. Scientist throughout the years who have tried to replicate it, have largely failed, but not all of them. Vicary claimed to have boosted Coca Cola and popcorn sales by priming people with ‘drink Coca Cola’ and ‘eat popcorn’ in a movie. This is the first example of subliminal persuasion, though it’s fake. Dijksterhuis researched this and found that after a drink-related prime, participants tend to drink more.

Aarts et al., researched the impact of needs. In this case, the influence of manipulated thirst (physical need) on cognition and behavior. In this experiment participants eat salt, sweet or no liquorish. This was done to induce thirst. Then drink-related items were made more accessible and thirsty people responded quicker. They also drink more and recall more drink-related items.

The experiment of Vicary was repeated in a way with Lipton Ice. They were subliminally primed with ‘Lipton Ice’ or ‘Npeic Tol’ and were then asked to choose between Spa Red or Lipton Ice. In the thirsty from liquorish and the not thirsty category, people tended to choose Lipton Ice more, but this was stronger in the thirsty category.

The conclusion that can be drawn, is that priming only works when the prime is goal-relevant. More generally, these findings suggest that a subliminal prime of a specific means to accomplish one’s current goal, will positively influence a person’s actual choice, for that particular means. This is so, because it is made highly accessible through the prime.

In the Lipton experiment, habits were also measured. If people have no habit, priming a product brand increases consumption of the brand. If people have a strong habit, priming the habitual brand does not increase consumption, because it is already high. If people have a strong habit for an alternative brand, priming does increase the consumption of the primed brand.

So, research has shown that if the conditions are right, subliminal advertising or other forms of priming can be made to work to promote the brand, to activate related knowledge, to activate behavior and to activate goals.

Perception always activates behavioral tendencies, but people can inhibit these tendencies, so were not lost yet. Limits to automaticity can be researched by priming with helpfulness or with a control prime. People tend to help more with picking up regular pens instead of leaky ones and if they’ve been primed with helpfulness. This also goes for people who aren’t in a hurry and are primed with helpfulness.

Week 7

Influences of Cialdini

The most influential research deals with compliance, so there’s no change in attitudes. The principles of Cialdini work by click-whirr responses, which means that people react mindlessly with scripts and heuristics. Social influence principles are less effective for long term behavior change.

The six Cialdini principles explained on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFdCzN7RYbw

The first principle is social proof

People tend to follow others, especially if those others are similar. People automatically think that if everyone is doing it, it must be good. We do this, because we have a need for approval, which includes the need to belong and the need for correct information. This is especially true when we feel uncertain, like shown by Asch. Goldstein, Griskevicius and Cialdini have shown that people reuse their towel more if an ad says: 75% of the guests who stayed in this room reused their towels.

The second principle: commitment

People like to be consistent and they dislike to be inconsistent. This feels bad, like with cognitive dissonance. Strategies to reduce this, are remaking dissonant cognitions, adding new consonant cognitions and changing behavior. Advertising strategies consist of making people commit to something and making people reduce the dissonance by changing behavior.

• An example of this, is the foot-in-the-door technique. This means that people comply with a small request and then asking for something bigger, but related.

• Low balling consists of compliance with a small request and then the conditions change, so that the initial request becomes more costly. So, a person wants to sell you a car for 200 bucks and when you comply, he says the car is actually 300 and then you still comply, though you wouldn’t have bought the car for 300 if you knew beforehand.

• Social labelling means assigning a label to a person and then asking for something in line with that label. An example is asking a person if they love animals, which is a question people usually say yes to, and then asking for money for an animal fund.

The third principle: reciprocity

People feel in debt, when they get something from others and they want to repay the favor. Tit-for-tat is based on this and it can have long term benefits if people trust each other. An example strategy of this, is the door-in-the-face technique. In this case, a person asks a big request and then a small request, so it looks like you’re both compromising, when just the other person is. The that’s not all technique consists of keep giving positive things. Free samples also cause a feelings of reciprocity.

The fourth principle: liking

People are more easily persuaded by people they like. People are liked when they are similar, familiar, close to us or people who we associate with positive things. The name letter effect means that people like things that start with the same letter as their first name. A Tupperware party uses familiar and close others to persuade people to buy Tupperware. Facebook uses this too. Using people who we associate with positive things, can be done by using well liked celebrities in ads. We also love compliments, even if we’re aware of people sucking up.

The fifth principle: authority

People tend to follow the expert and authority, like shown by Milgram. This effect is moderated by the white coat, which the authority wears. We do this, because authorities are usually right (heuristic) and obeying authorities has an advantage in society. Authorities are often trustworthy and credible. Different sources of authority are showing titles, clothes and trappings (items of symbolic value). Expensive cars show status, so in an experiment, people honk less when expensive cars stand still in front of a green traffic light, in comparison to cheap cars. Celebrities can also be seen as authorities, in combination with liking.

The sixth principle: scarcity

Opportunities seem more valuable when it’s limited. People usually thinks that if something is unique or scarce, it must be good, because they don’t like to lose things. A gain/loss frame means that ads work better, when they only name gains and not the losses, which are implied. Another reason that people resist limitations to freedom, which is called reactance. People value their freedom and when it’s taken away, they want to regain it. Tactics include the limited number technique, the deadline tactic, supply scarcity (not a lot of the product is made) and demand scarcity (something is sold out, because other people want it too). Cialdini calls this contagious competition, because social norms may also be at work.

The next study isn’t in the book, by Herpen, Pieters and Zeelenberg. Research was done on product involvement (with wine) and on whether people had a need for uniqueness. The hypothesis in this study were that scarcity only has an influence on preference when people are involved, that a need for uniqueness goal increases the influence of supply scarcity and that this the influence of demand scarcity decreases

The first hypothesis was confirmed. When people are highly involved, scarcity has the strongest effect. The second hypothesis was also confirmed. When a goal to be unique is active, people prefer the supply scarce wine. The third hypothesis wasn’t confirmed. A need for uniqueness goals doesn’t decrease the influence of demand scarcity. Demand scarcity increases preference, regardless of uniqueness goals. The overall conclusion was that demand scarcity seems most influential. However, scarcity doesn’t have universal effects, but depends on the type of scarcity and individual differences in motivation. It is interesting to see that when people are highly involved, they tend to not process by heuristics and scarcity still had an effect.

Online advertising

Aspects of online advertising include having more control over contact with ads and over the content of the ads. There is less social presence than in real life and more anonymity. Online advertising gives more possibilities for targeting, like with cookies. This influences online trust. Trust is a willingness to make oneself vulnerable to another in the presence of risk.

Features of online communication do not help with trust, when people feel anonymous, there is less social presence and cues and there is a time lag (asynchrony). Increasing trust can be done by showing that you’re benevolent and that you have integrity. It’s also important to show capability. The third aspect increases feelings of trust the most and also subsequent purchases. But feelings of trust also depend on individual differences, like regulatory focus.

Regulatory focus means that some people have a prevention focus, so they want to minimize losses, and others have a promotion focus, so they want to maximize gains. People with a prevention focus want safety and security cues. People with a promotion focus want to see professionality, which shows capability. A safe bet is to do both: having a professional website and including safety cues.

Being online means multitasking. The threaded cognitions theory says that multitasking is possible, if the tasks use different resources, no interference, but not if they use the same resources. Multitasking increases cognitive load and decrease concentration, so people are more likely to process heuristically. If people see something on a computer, they tend to believe that it’s true more often than something seen on paper, because they process heuristically.

Three types of content which influence persuasion are:

• Explicit online advertising: like banners. These are most effective with a picture on the left and text on the right, according to the matching activation theory.

• More subtle online ads: like decision tools. These can have an information function, like comparison matrices, of a persuasion function, like recommendation agents. The last kind are more influential, but also have a higher chance of reactance.

• Online word of mouth (WOM): like reviews.

WOM may be more important than regular ads. Negative WOM is more influential than positive. This is because of the negativity bias, which means that negative things have a greater effect than positive things. Emotions matter too for WOM. In an experiment with one review, when a reviewer was mad, it is seen as lower in informative value. If the reviewer was happy, it had no effect. Mad reviews lead to less strong negative evaluations, because they see the reviewers as irrational. When the experiment is done with more than one review, mad ones have a negative effect and positive ones a positive effect. Emotions help to increase WOM. Anger, happiness and surprise arouse emotions and this is what you want with an ad. Standing out helps also.

Effects of the online world

Online adds are often targeted and tailored to an individual. The google memory effect means that google is seen as a part of our memory, because when we don’t know things, we can just look them up. When people are told to remember something, they don’t, when they’re also told where they can look it up. We remember less fact, but we do remember where to find them. Neural consequences of the online world are that smart phones are seen as a part of our body and this has several side effects. Online ads offer more opportunities for more active engagement, better targeting and larger reach, but the basic way in which people process and remember information, from attitudes, and become persuaded is still fairly similar. So, we don’t need to change our approach to advertising entirely.

Which things are important for the exam?

• Herpen, Pieters and Zeelenberg explains the difference between demand scarcity and supply scarcity. The lecturer said it is not really important to know the difference for the exam, so he skipped the example.

Overall

Goals of the entire course

• What is the impact of advertising on consumer behavior and what causes this?

• Which psychological processes make advertising effective?

• How do consumers make sense of advertising messages, which messages get across and why?

• How do new online and digital technologies affect consumer behavior?

Important things covered in the lectures

• The four stages going from unconsciousness to consciousness.

• What do we remember of ads and why does this influence consumer cognition and choices?

• Implicit and explicit attitudes and how to measure these (IAT).

• Wat works well and why? (Tactics)

• How do we change attitudes?

• Does changing attitudes mean changing behaviors and how?

• Social influence and online advertising.

The guest lecture of Cees Wijnobel is included in the exam, but only the theories and such covered, not the advertising examples.

Source

These sheetnotes are based on the lecture notes of Psychology of Advertising at the University of Leiden 2015-2016 and contain updates of the lectures in 17/18 with regard to the lectures of 15/16