Psychology of advertising pdf

Which messages "get across" successfully and when, and why? How do new online and digital technologies affect consumer judgement and choice? Engagingly written, and including a comprehensive glossary of frequently used concepts, The Psychology of Advertising is a unique and invaluable resource for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, and for researchers and lecturers in social psychology, marketing, and communications.

Author : Gerhard Raab,G. It will be of immeasurable help to marketing executives and higher level students of marketing needing an advanced understanding of the applied science of psychology and how it bears on consumers; on influencing; and on the effective marketing of organizations themselves, as well as of products and services.

Complemented by case studies from across the globe, The Psychology of Marketing provides a trans-national perspective on how the theory revealed here is applied in practice. Marketers and those aspiring to be marketers will find this book an invaluable help in their role as 'lay psychologists'.

Supported by current research, Seducing the Subconscious shows us just how strange and complicated our relationship is with the ads we see every day. Second, the model assumes that not all thinking or processing is not equal in operation or effects. Just as we can think more or less about a topic that is to say, we can elaborate on it to a high or low degree so too we can also think about it in different ways.

The ways we think about information, as much as how much thinking we do, can also change the effects of an advert. Attitudes changed along the central route are more likely to endure, more likely to persist in spite of counter arguments, be more likely to be report by the consumer and be more predictive or behavior than attitudes arrived at through the peripheral route.

Third, there is a probabilistic relationship between the amount and type of thinking a consumer does and the extent to which they will be persuaded by an advert. In technical terms, the ELM assumes that the central route is likely to be followed if a consumer is motivated and able to assess a message. Finally, although the model pictures the central and peripheral routes as discrete entities, in reality they form a continuum. Any interaction with a persuasive message will fall somewhere in-between the central and peripheral routes.

The implication of this is that different features within an advert and the context in which it is consumed known as message and situational variables respectively can have different effects on the likelihood of high, moderate or low levels of elaboration. Generally, argument quality will be the main but not only effect in high elaboration likelihood, both argument quality and cue attractiveness in moderate elaboration likelihood and cue attractiveness in low elaboration likelihood.

There is, then, a probabilistic relationship between a message and the likelihood that it will be elaborated to a high or low extent. The social consumer: social psychology Cognitive psychology is not the only academic discipline that has attempted to explain how advertising works. Although alternative perspectives are less popular within academic research, it is worth considering alternative explanations for the effectiveness of advertising to understand some of the limits with the cognitive approach.

Within social psychology, in particular, it is argued that we do act not exclusively on the basis of information stored in our own internal memory banks but in accordance with the social setting we find ourselves in. Advertising is effective here. Indeed, social psychology is based on the idea that much of what we do is motivated by our desires to fit in with various social groups.

It emerged as a research discipline as academics sought to explain the atrocities of the Second World War. Researchers needed to explain how supposedly rational individuals working within large bureaucracies could be convinced to commit horrific acts on other human beings.

Researchers working within this tradition have, for example, explored how individuals can be made to behave in ways they find otherwise disgusting in order to go along with the crowd see the famous Stanford Prison Experiment, Asch Experiment and Milgram Experiment. Social proof and social learning Moving beyond an interest in the effects of authority, social psychologists have also come to explore the various mechanisms through which people figure out the appropriate action for a given social setting and how they moderate their behavior to fit in.

An everyday example of social proof influencing people is canned laughter on television shows. Researchers have shown that when a television show includes a laughter track the audience is more likely to laugh at the show and more likely to rate the jokes as funny Provine, The canned laughter demonstrates the correct or normal response to the joke. Even if we are sat at home alone watching a show, canned laughter provides us with evidence of what we should be finding funny and, as such, makes us more likely to find it funny.

Behind the notion of social proof lies a different model of learning from that which informs models such as the IPM and ELM. According to social psychologists, learning is not simply a process in which individuals store information.

Nor is it simply a mental task in which we link certain inputs with particular outputs as behaviorist psychologists believe. Instead, it is a process of making sense of an uncertain world. It involves guesswork, theories, heuristics and other people. In their study, Bandura et al. One group saw adults playing aggressively with the toy. They would hit it and kick it. Another saw the adults playing peacefully with the toy. The final group acted as a control.

Later, the children were allowed to play with the toy themselves. Even though there were no incentives to reinforce particular behaviours and the children were given no explicit information, Bandura et al found that the children acted in accordance with the behaviours they had previously witnessed.

That is to say, the children who saw adults acting aggressively also acted more aggressively while the children who saw adults playing peacefully also played more peacefully.

In a further study, Bandura and colleagues repeated the experiment using filmed illustrations of aggressive behavior. In this study they added an instructional element as well. The ending of the film was modified so that one group of children saw aggressive behavior being rewarded with candy and another saw the aggressive behavior being punished.

They found that children would imitate aggressive behavior irrelevant of whether they had been exposed to a real-life or filmed illustration and that children would later act out the aggressive behaviors irrelevant of whether they had seen the reward or punishment. The results of this study illustrate that seeing a behavior on film was just as powerful as seeing it in real life and that people learn how others behave from watching what they do —not the rewards or punishments they receive for those behaviors nor the instructions they are given.

Even if movies and video games show the consequences of violence, we are still influenced by being exposed to people acting violently.

Experiments confirm the effectiveness of social proof in changing other types of behaviors too. The concept of social proof, then, tells us that people will do whatever seems normal for their social setting and that they will figure this out by looking at what others are doing.

Importantly, for advertising researchers, it is not only what other people physically in our social setting are doing that affects us. Adverts can, in this sense, provide a form of peer pressure. Media representations of what we should be doing can be equally as effective as any other form of social proof. Cialdini explains: Television executives are hardly alone in their use of social evidence for profit.

Our tendency to assume that an action is more correct if others are doing it is exploited in a variety of settings.

AdTheory: Factors that affect the success of advertising in ELM Message variables include the nature of the argument and the framing of information in an advert. Differences have been found in the outcomes of two-sided and one-side arguments in adverts Hastak and Park, and between adverts that provide information and those which offer story-based testimonials Braverman, Metzler et al , for example, studied the impact of message variables on HIV social marketing.

They found that teenagers were more likely to be persuaded by strong messages with striking images than they were by weaker messages. Source variables include the credibility of the perceived sender of message. In advertising this can be the brand but it might also be a spokesperson in the advert itself.

Sources with a perceived high-level of trustworthiness have even been shown to be more important than the message quality. That is to say, viewers believe a highly trusted source more irrelevant of what they are saying. This may represent a case in which a message is processed through the central route but rejected as unconvincing. Receiver variables focus on difference between the people exposed to advertising.

They include the concept of involvement developed by consumer researchers. Receiver variables also cover pre-existing attitudes and individual difference. Channel variables cover features of the advertising media which affect how people receive adverts. Different media allow different types of message and demand different levels of attention on the part of the audience. In this regard, a number of studies have demonstrated that the effectiveness of internet advertising is moderated by the distractions of browsing online.

The ad shows bottles of Alpecin lined up. As the advert begins, they start flying off the screen. This ad makes no attempt to explain how the shampoo works nor does it provide any demonstration of it working — which, as we have seen, leading advertisers such as Claude Hopkins and Rosser Reeves would have recommended.

Its message is simply: you should buy this shampoo because other people are. It is a normal thing to do. He suggests that the idea of missing out on something that others have is a powerful motivation for everyone. The sale, the free-gift, the special offer all not only indicate what others are doing but suggest we might miss out if we do not act. For example, when you visit the supermarket you might be tempted by an impulse purchase for a product you did not want because you do not want to miss out on a bargain.

Consumer researchers have found that such calls to action, added with social proof, can be extremely powerful. In contrast to the cognitive models we discussed earlier, which focused on the effect of information mediated through attitudes on behavior, social psychologists argue that calls to action pressure us to act by turning our in-built desire to fit in against us. Advertising, according to this view, is effective when it provides social proof about what we should do and motivates us to act.

As such, social psychology encourages us to explain how advertising work not simply by taking an individual ad in isolation or an individual consumer in isolation but by contextualizing advertising in a given social setting. While you, no doubt, know that this is a completely manufactured event designed to boost retail sales after Christmas, you will no doubt feel pressured to act, whether that is a worry about getting a card or a worry that you have bought a big enough bouquet for your loved one, because it is what people do.

We might know better, but because everyone is doing it, we go along with the crowd. We can see this theory of advertising at work in the regulation of advertising in the UK. Regulations prohibit advertisers from suggesting vice products such as tobacco, alcohol and gambling are necessary for social acceptance. The regulations prohibit advertisers from providing social proof concerning these products.

The unmanageable consumer: non-conscious and unconscious processes A final psychological theory of advertising takes us back to the work of Ernest Dichter — the influential branding consultant we covered at the start of the module. Symbolism Dichter argued that consumers are not simple things. It is complex, contradictory and confusing.

The connections between inputs and outputs are not straightforward. They are, rather, circuitous, interconnected and rhizomatic. We cannot explain everything with one model. Indeed, rather than assume that people make decisions like computers, as the early cognitive researchers did, and rather than take people out of their social setting and embed them in fabricated laboratories for social psychological experiments, Dichter went out and spoke to consumers, he watched them, observed them and listened to them.

He was, in this sense, an early advocate of consumer anthropology. Though this empirical work, Dichter found that consumers were very unreliable subjects. They could not accurately say what they did — let alone why they did it. But, influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis, Dichter thought that there was something meaningful in what consumers said.

According to Freud, what we say and how we act reveal our motivations even if we were unwilling to admit to them. In effect, Freud argued, that when we sleep we turn off our consciousness — leaving our unconscious thoughts free reign to occupy our minds.

Analysing these images, Freud repeatedly found that the things people dreamed about actually made sense in terms of their life histories. He concluded that there are powerful thoughts and desires that motivate our behaviours even though we are unable to think about them consciously. Advertising, Dichter argued, should speak to these hidden motivations. That is to say, by using symbolic images that made sense to our unconscious desires, adverts link products to our unconscious desires and make objects meaningful.

The first step in the process involved exploring the potential motivations at work for a specific group of consumers regarding a specific product type. Here, Dichter used standard Figure 6 - Freud's model of the brain psychoanalytic tests such as free association, sentence completion and projection tests and anthropological observations to piece together an account of what motivated particular consumers in relation to a brand or product. But, as depth psychology suggests that consumers will find their own motivations unbelievable and the chains of symbolic connections silly more accurately, their conscious minds will , Dichter knew people would find his conclusions ridiculous.

Consequently, he supported his interpretations with extensive market research. In fact, Dicther was an early adopter of large-scale survey and experimental methods for marketing.

Dichter was employed by Chrysler to assist their Plymouth brand which was struggling to appeal to car buyers. Dichter spent time in car dealerships watching how buyers made decisions and interviewed hundreds of consumers. He noticed two things. First, when a family went shopping for a new car, the wife was far more important in the decisions-making process than was previously thought. Second, he noticed that a certain kind of man would engage in a standard pattern of behaviour. Middle-aged, married men would typically gravitate to the more racy sports cars in a showroom before turning their attention to the more sedate and practical cars.

Indeed, Dicther went as far as to equate the sports cars with mistresses and the practical cars with marriage. Dichter observed that these married men had no intention of leaving their wives and, if asked would deny every considering the thought.

Convertible cars allowed them, then, to act out their fantasy of escape without having to go through with it. In other words, car brands had to acquire the right type of meanings in order to resonate with consumers and in order to be perceived as attractive by them … He thus advised his clients to build motivational appeals that fuelled the flames of desire not so much through exciting words and pictures but through psychological excitement engendered by the promise of dreams coming true Pre-Dichter car adverts competed to offer more features, faster speeds and bigger engines.

They provided information hoping to produce a favorable attitude among consumers. Post-Dichter car adverts focused on where you could go. Perhaps the most famous of these immigrants was Ernest Dichter. Dichter argued that brands should find out what motivated their consumers and design their adverts to appeal to these motivations. He worked as a consultant, offering brands access to this knowledge using his unique approach to consumer research.

Depth psychology, as described by Dichter, starts from the assumption that people are motivated by something internal to them — not something that is imported in through advertising. These internal drives and desires are, according to motivation researchers, hidden. The individual themselves will not know about them. View 2 excerpts, cites background. Emotion Were Popular. The impact of advertising appeals on consumers' perception of an ad in the context of technical products.

The primary goal of this study is to identify the impact of certain advertising appeals on consumers perception of an advertisement and a presented product. Message appeal, endorser type, and … Expand. Web advertising: Assessing beliefs, attitudes, purchase intention and behavioral responses. Highly Influenced. View 4 excerpts, cites background. Uninformative Advertising as an Invitation to Search.

Business, Computer Science. View 1 excerpt, cites methods. Three-phase model of consumers' behaviours : a synthesis of the theory of planned behaviour, self-determination theory and planning. Using a longitudinal study, an overall behavioural model with three related phases cognitive, motivational and volitional phase across three studies was examined to identify the factors that most … Expand.

The workings and limits of subliminal advertising: The role of habits. Despite years of controversy, recent research demonstrated that, if goal-relevant, subliminal advertising can be feasible.