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Attitudes & Advertising lecture notes
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Very elaborate notes on course: Attitudes & Advertising, given by W. Sleegers
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Attitudes and Personality lecturesContents
Lecture 1.................................................................................................................................................1
Lecture 2.................................................................................................................................................5
Lecture 3...............................................................................................................................................12
Lecture 4...............................................................................................................................................18
Lecture 5...............................................................................................................................................22
Lecture 6...............................................................................................................................................29
Lecture 7...............................................................................................................................................40
Lecture 8...............................................................................................................................................47
Lecture 9...............................................................................................................................................54
Lecture 10.............................................................................................................................................63
Lecture 11.............................................................................................................................................70
Lecture 12.............................................................................................................................................78
Lecture 1
Book starts with a story
- Highlighted things -> keep getting overloaded with things you are not interested in and
distract you -> Willem despises this, but how can all of this really work? There seems to be
competition between messages and create reactance on your side
o Do the advertisements have effects on us?
o Will be the question throughout the course -> how can we understand this?
What is an attitude?
- Super important in a lot of different fields, but also in advertisement
- The meaning of attitude is not that clear
o The categorization of a stimulus object along an evaluative dimension
o An association in memory between a given object and a given summary evaluation of
the object
o Other definitions
Is it a memory or constructed on the spot? Is it a tendency that’s enduring ->
is it easy to change them?
- One of the reasons a definition is not easy
o You can’t see them
o You can see stimuli and how people react tot that stimuli
Someone buys a Starbucks and drinks it -> what is the attitude here?
Infer the attitude from what can be observed -> the person most
likely likes Starbucks
, - ‘an attitude is a hypothetical construct’
o Even for ourselves we have this problem -> we need to infer our own attitudes from
things we observe
How can we measure them?
- Self-report -> straightforward way of asking people
o Likert scales -> strongly agree to strongly disagree
o Very powerful and easy to use -> but you have to ask really clear questions
o Do people know what their attitudes are? -> if not, asking them what they are
doesn’t work
- Implicit measures/indirect measures
o Rorschach image -> outdated measure and not reliable at all
Who people an image and ask them what you see -> what they say reveals
what their attitude might be
o Reliability or validity of these implicit measures is not measured clearly
o They are trying to improve these measures
Task -> people see a word and have to categorize them on the left or right as
quickly as possible
Pleasant associated with apple and unpleasant with Samsung
o Then the other way around
Associate the word quickly with Samsung or Apple -> find out the
underlying attitude toward the brands (that the participant doesn’t
really now themselves)
Do attitudes influence behavior?
- Yes -> if the answer is no, why do we care about attitudes?
- There were quite some studies with the answer no
o Attitudes poor measure of behavior
- So which one is true? -> both are false -> attitudes don’t always predict behavior
o So -> maybe?
o When can we predict attitudes being likely to predict behavior
How can we change attitudes?
- How can we persuade people?
o Via a technique change their attitude to make it more positive toward our product or
more negative toward something that’s not good
- Compliance/conformity -> we don’t change the attitude of the person -> immediately illicit a
behavior
o Ask people on the street to donate
- Internal and external influences
o Attention, memory, age, personality, individual differences
o Culture, message, source (who says the message)
We will mostly use the context of advertising
- Attitudes are relevant in many different fields, not just advertising
Advertising
, - Tricky to define because things are changing a lot
- Before -> paid form of communication by someone to persuade people
- Started with people on the streets yelling they had things to sell and then ->
o Printing press -> printing advertisements
o Radio -> to sell certain products
o Videos on tv showing up
- Video of the first advertisement
o Very different from advertisements now
o Earlier on -> giving people information is useful
o Now -> people don’t always pay attention or are motivated to process information ->
quick and effective advertisements and use conditioning to develop favorable
feelings towards it
Advertising functions
- Informing the individual consumer
o Need to tell consumers the products that are available
o Communicating with consumers about products and services
If you have bought this car, there are some mistakes in it, so bring it back
- Persuading the individual consumer to buy your product/develop a positive attitude
- Funding public mass media and other resources
o Newspapers/sports events that are possible through sponsorships
o But, there are also other ways to fund these things, so it’s
- Facilitating competition -> you can compete via different advertisements
o Bit weird argument
- Creating jobs -> weird argument in the book, why would you say this?
Advertising dangers
- Persuasion can be manipulating -> misleading consumers by omitting important information
so people infer the wrong thing
o There are organisations who work against this
- Fund misinformation -> especially on the internet with banner ads, everyone can spread their
information or misinformation
- Create unrealistic expectations -> perhaps of the product, but also in terms of what the
society looks like
o Tend to use very beautiful and successful people -> people are a lot uglier and a loss
well of than in the advertisements
- Create unfair competition -> as a well established company you can compete with
advertisements a lot more than as a small company
o Competition in general pushes people to make better and better products
- Advertising ruined the interned
Advertising
- 560 billion dollars in 2019
o Has a lot of zeros -> it is a very large number
- Doing a study means you want to do an experiment
o In real life it’s difficult to work with a control group -> not advertise in a part of the
country, but that’s a missed opportunity
, o Instead -> if we advertise, what happens to the sales? -> hope to find and increase
o But because no experimental design -> might be other reason for increase in sales
Companies also know when sales are more likely to go up -> right before the
company
Possible approaches to assessing advertising
- The naïve approach is thinking it must be effective, because why would companies spend
money on it?
o You have the advertising company and the company itself -> advertising companies
will say it’s effective, because they will keep their jobs then
- Economic approach -> correlate the money you spent and the sale you get
o Are you getting money back from it?
o Is mostly correlational so you can’t make inferences
- Advertising effectiveness in terms of the number of individuals in a target population that is
exposed to the message
- The creative approaches equates effectiveness with creativity -> we do cool things, so it must
work
Our approach
- Going to be about psychology
- Claude C. Hopkins -> The competent advertising man must understand psychology -> what
kind of effect your advertisement has on the people
- The psychological approach
o Link stimuli that you use and see what kind of effects these have on specific
individuals
o What is the process at work when you present these people with specific stimuli
o Articulate the intrapersonal, interpersonal or group-level psychological processes
that are responsible for the relationship between ad stimuli and consumer responses
- A scientific psychological approach
o Based on data/scientific studies
o Many so-called advertising techniques are not supported by scientific evidence -> no
checking on whether they are true
o Also -> this topic of persuading people and trying to figure out why it works is very
difficult
There will be disagreements and inconsistencies in the findings
Advertising-related question
- Can we change attitudes towards products, brand, companies and if so how?
o Should we use arguments?
o Should we use feelings?
- What are common techniques to change people attitudes
- Most important: How do the advertising techniques work?
o What are the underlying psychological principles?
Attitudes & advertising the course
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