A summary of all the lectures and required chapters from the book of Attitudes & Advertsing (Economic Psychology).
The book: Bob M. Fennis en Wolfgang Stroebe, The Psychology
of Advertising, ISBN 3061
The summarized chapters are:
1 - Setting the stage
4 - How consumers form attitudes towards pro...
What is an attitude?
“A psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with
some degree of favor or disfavor.”
“An attitude is a hypothetical construct.”
How can we measure attitudes?
- Self-report
How can we change attitudes?
- Persuasion
- Compliance/conformity
- Internal and external influences
Approaches on advertising
- Naïve approach: assumes that advertising must be effective, simply because
it is so omnipresent and advertising expenditures are big and ever increasing
- Economic approach: tries to address the effects issue by correlating
advertising expenditures with changes in sales volume
- Media approach: conceptualizes advertising effectiveness in terms of the
number of individuals in a specific target population who have been exposed
to a message
- Creative approach: equates effectiveness with creativity
- Psychological approach: aims at relating specific advertising stimuli to
specific and individual consumer responses. It seeks to articulate the
intrapersonal, interpersonal or group-level psychological processes that are
responsible for the relationship between ad stimuli and consumer responses.
o Scientific psychological approach: most so-called advertising
techniques are not supported by scientific evidence
Chapter 1 – Setting the stage
Consumer responses
- Affective consumer responses: more or less transient emotions and moods
that can occur as a function of ad exposure and differ in valence
(positive/negative) and intensity
- Behavioral consumer responses: intention and actual behavior
- Cognitive consumer responses: beliefs and thoughts about brands,
products and services that consumers generate in response to ads
,Experiential products such as wine, soft drinks, perfumes, etc. are evaluated primarily
by personal preference and thus lend themselves well to affect-based appeals.
Durable products such as computers, but also nondurable products such as
toothpaste or washing powder, are typically communicated with rational, argument-
based appeals.
A type of emotion used in advertising is fear in fear-arousing communications
where advertisers scare the consumer into action. They frequently refer to risks that
the consumer can either prevent or reduce by buying the product.
Lecture 2 – Attitudes
Attitudes are evaluative responses, directed towards some attitude object and based
on three classes of information:
Aspects of disagreement
1) Should attitudes be defined as a predisposition to evaluate an attitude object in a
particular way or as the evaluative response itself?
- Attitudes are definitely not unitary.
- Explicit attitudes are evaluations of which the individual is consciously aware
and that can be expressed using self-report measures.
Implicit attitudes are evaluations of which the individual is typically not aware
and that influence reactions or actions over which the individual has little or no
control.
Hoffman et al. (2005)
Correlations between the IAT and explicit self-report measures systematically
increased as a function of increasing spontaneity of self-reports and
increasing conceptual correspondence between measures.
- Attitude ambivalence
Goldstein & Strube (1994)
Participant’s mood was measured twice and in between they were told what
their exam score was, as well as what the average was.
, - Attitude consistency
Consistency combines with ambivalence, unless you need to act on it.
- Dual attitudes
These findings challenge the view of attitudes as a unitary construct.
2) Are attitudes stable or context dependent?
- File-drawer model
Attitudes can persist for many years or even a lifetime.
- Attitudes-as-constructions perspective
Attitudes change with changing context.
- Wilson & Kraft (1993)
Pretest: attitude towards relationship
Manipulation: give reasons for choosing your major (control) or give reasons
for why you think your relationship is going the way it is (experimental)
Posttest: attitude towards relationship again
Results
Correlation between first and second measure
Control condition: 0.89
Experimental condition: 0.53
- Attitude stability
Depends on attitude strength, an attitude is strong when it has:
High stability
An great impact on behavior
Great influence on information processing
Great resistance to persuasion
Strong attitudes are likely stored in memory and therefore stable. Weak
attitudes are likely constructed on the spot and therefore likely to be affected
by random influences, making it unstable.
How are attitudes formed?
Based on the three classes of information: cognitive, affective and behavioral.
, 1) Cognitive information
Ads based on reviews, experts or experience. Makes use of heuristics such
as country of origin, price-quality or brand image.
Woodfolk, Castellan & Books (1983)
Preference for Pepsi or Coca Cola, taste-tested to confirm, but the drinks were
mislabeled.
2) Affective information
Based on experience, conditioning and affect-as-information (skepticism
required).
Does it require cognitive information?
Zajonc (1980)
We often cannot vocalize our reasons for liking or disliking something.
Reasoning is often post-hoc and rearely changes our attitudes.
Empirical support: mere exposure effect: inreased liking for repeatedly
presented stimuli (without recognition). Why does frequency of exposure
increase liking?
Perceptual fluency
Affect-as-information? Example: effect of weather on life satisfaction.
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