This detailed summary covers everything for the Marketing Communication exam and has been built up through web clips and interactive lectures, including detailed notes and examples from discussions in class 2023.
Table of Contents
(Note that Session 1 is just an introduction session; not relevant for this summary)
Session 2: Breaking Through the Advertising Clutter....................................................... 3
2.1 Recap on Attention.......................................................................................................3
2.2 Increasing Voluntary and Involuntary Attention............................................................ 4
2.3 How campaigns can stand out: increasing ease of processing....................................6
Session 3: Pre-Suasion and Persuasion............................................................................. 9
3.1 Recap on Attitudes and Attitude Functions.................................................................. 9
3.2 Persuasion: a dual system approach......................................................................... 10
3.3 Cognitive persuasion..................................................................................................12
3.4 Resistance to persuasion........................................................................................... 14
Session 4: Affective Persuasion.........................................................................................16
4.1 Setting the stage: why affect?.................................................................................... 16
4.2 Affective persuasion................................................................................................... 19
Processing fluency........................................................................................................... 21
4.3 Affect regulation......................................................................................................... 21
Session 5: Nudging and Choice Architecture................................................................... 23
5.1 Influence and behavioral economics.......................................................................... 23
5.2 Four heuristics from behavioral economics................................................................24
5.3 Confirmation bias and status quo bias....................................................................... 26
Session 6: Social Nudges and Social Influence................................................................28
6.1 Social Networks: who to influence?............................................................................28
6.2 Social motives: why do people rely on others............................................................ 29
6.3 Why people share information....................................................................................31
6.4 Endorsements: celebrities vs. influencers.................................................................. 32
Session 7: Issues in Media Planning................................................................................. 34
7.1 Advertising in a changing media landscape............................................................... 34
7.2 Advertising repetition..................................................................................................37
7.3 Context effects........................................................................................................... 39
,Session 2: Breaking Through the Advertising
Clutter
2.1 Recap on Attention
Advertisers want to catch consumers’ attention and want to break through the clutter. In
order to understand how you can break through the clutter, it’s important to understand what
is meant with attention and why it’s so important.
Attention is…
● Limited: people only have just a limited pool of resources available and cannot
consciously experience all the events and information that is available at a certain
point in time.
● Selective: as a result, people selectively attend to the most important and salient
pieces of information in the environment.
● Voluntary: people voluntarily allocate attention to things that are important to them;
or involuntary: salient or surprising things (e.g. a red star that unexpectedly flashes
on the screen) automatically and unintentionally draw attention.
● A precondition for further processing: only after attention is allocated to a stimulus,
sufficient resources are freed up to process further information.
More attention means more cognitive capacity, which increases the likelihood that people will comprehend and
elaborate on the message.
As shown on the right, attention is the first and
most necessary step for any (effect in)
communication to take place.
Any communication message needs attention
before consumers can further process it and
make decisions and judgments about it.
Levels of processing/involvement
● Pre-attention: little or no capacity required and rather an automatic, unconscious
form of processing.
● Focal (or voluntary) attention: a stimulus turns out to be important, still little
capacity is required.
● Comprehension: modest levels of capacity required.
● Elaboration: substantial levels of capacity are required.
In the flowchart on the right, it is shown
how the levels of attention (also called
audience involvement) correspond with
the levels of information processing.
,2.2 Increasing Voluntary and Involuntary Attention
Increasing involuntary and voluntary attention.
Increasing involuntary attention
Involuntary attention is an unconscious process that causes an automatic orienting
response. Four psychological mechanisms that can increase involuntary attention to a
stimulus are:
This kind of stimulus unconsciously and intentionally attracts attention and is associated with
bottom-up processing (allow the stimulus itself to shape our perception).
Saliency (salient stimuli):
● Perceptually prominent (size, color, contrast, …)
● Novel, unexpected, and original stimuli.
● Stimuli related to life and death.
These stimuli:
● Stick out and are hard to ignore.
● Lead to mild psychological arousal.
● Result in focal attention to the source of stimulation.
Yerkes-Dodson law states that mild to moderate
levels of arousal will result in a relatively high level
of cognitive capacity. Thus, mild levels of arousal
will make sure that we allocate a sufficient level of
resources to try to understand the stimuli. If
arousal is either too high or too low, very little
cognitive capacity is available, and people will find
it more difficult to process the communication.
The inverted U-shape implies that having stimuli with too high levels of arousal may cause
detrimental effects on the elaboration. This is why fear appeals, for
example, are sometimes not very efficient in the domain of marketing
communication.
Horizontal centrality
Stimuli in the center receive more attention and are more likely to be
chosen.
, Primacy
Consumers are more attentive to items that are presented first on the list.
An explanation for this is that one might say that in the beginning we still
have a lot of cognitive resources left. And given that attention is limited,
more attention goes to the beginning of the list. Also, we have learned that
items that are presented first are oftentimes the most important ones
(learning effect/learning explanation).
Picture superiority
Pictorial information receives more information than textual information.
● Pictures: attract attention, regardless of size.
● Text: the bigger the text, the more attention.
● Brand: the bigger the brand name, the more attention.
Increasing voluntary attention
Voluntary attention is often times conscious and intended. Voluntary attention can be
increased through so-called magnitizers:
● Increase self-relevance
○ Personal interest and in-attentional blindness.
○ Self-referencing
○ Proximity and curiosity.
● Curiosity
○ Unfinished ads.
○ Mysterious ads.
Magnitizers: because of self-relevance and because the information is important to us, we
deliberately allocate more resources to process, and that’s why they’re called magnitizers.
This form of processing is associated with top-down processing. We relate the incoming
information to what we already know, to what we like, what we prefer, and so on. Thus, we
process the incoming information from the perspective of the things that we (already) know.
Personal interest & inattentional blindness
In general, consumers allocate more attention to information that is consistent with their
goals. Information that is not relevant, is often ignored and will lead to inattentional
blindness. This is due to the fact that attention is limited and selective, and therefore we can
only focus on the relevant information while ignoring irrelevant information.
If you’re, for example, not worried about being pregnant, the following advertisement
will most likely be ignored.
More marketing related is shown in the second example: banner
blindness and ETS avoidance. Here, consumers just skip the
first sponsored ads just because it’s not relevant to them. People
also learn to actively avoid commercial messages.
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