Summary Marketing Communication
Week 1:
- Lecture 1: Effective marketing communication: a game of hurdles
- Chapter 1: Setting the stage
- Chapter 2: Hurdle #1, how consumers acquire and process information from
advertising
Week 2:
- Lecture 2: Memory and attitudes
- Chapter 3: Hurdle #2, how advertising affects consumer memory
- Chapter 4: Hurdle #3, how to target attitudes, the ‘forgotten’ effectiveness indicator
Week 3:
- Lecture 3: Persuasion and behavior
- Chapter 5: Hurdle #4, how consumers yield to advertising
- Chapter 6: Hurdle #5, how to bridge the intention-behavior gap
Week 4: tutorials - no literature
Week 5:
- Lecture 4: Nudging and online consumer behavior
- Chapter 7: Hurdle #6, how to nudge consumer behavior change
- Chapter 8: Hurdle #7, how to persuade the online consumer
Week 6: tutorials - no literature
Week 7:
- Lecture 5
,Week 1
Lecture 1: Effective marketing communication: a game of hurdles
Individual perspective: predicting the impact of specific advertising variables on specific,
individual consumer responses and explain the processes responsible for any advertising
impact
- This perspective is taken in the course
- This means that we have to focus on specific ad variables:
- Source (endorser) variables: (the source of the ad)
- Expertise/credibility/trustworthiness
- Attractiveness
- Number
- Fame etc
- Message variables:
- Argument quality: how strong are the arguments
- Argument quantity
- Information density
- Internal/external pacing etc
- All variables translate to all communication tools: regular advertising, direct
marketing, sales promotion, interactive marketing, PR, personal selling etc
Individual and specific consumer responses:
- Cognitive responses: what they think about the ad/brand:
- Beliefs, evaluations, inferences, convictions, awareness, attitudes,
preferences
- Affective responses: feelings about the ad/brand:
- Emotions and moods, transient (short) and enduring, positively/negatively
valenced
- Behavioral responses: acting towards the ad/brand
- Trail vs habit, buying (very exceptional), using, disposing
- All type of responses influence each other
Context
- More than 1000 commercial stimuli a day, which have the potential to create a
response
- Does not mean that you will actually have a response
- Consumers have to be selective in processing information, since we are not able to
process all the information in our working memory
Advertising: any form of paid (or not paid) communication by an identified sponsor (or not
sponsored) aimed to inform and/or persuade target audiences about an organization,
product, service or idea
- Advertising for all promotion tools, and media tools in the marketing communication
toolbox
- Argument-based appeals: getting information across
- Mostly affect thinking; cognitive responses
- Emotional-based appeals: getting emotions across
- Mostly affect feelings; affective responses
, - Both may affect behavioral responses
- Usually, you cannot have both, and might be better to make a distinct choice
- Make a choice between the two, because both types are effective for other groups of
consumers and ineffective for the remainder
Two key functions of advertising
To inform and/or to persuade
- The persuasion function is way more important
1. Inform: change non evaluative consumer responses (beliefs, knowledge)
- You want that your information given will feed the persuasion of the consumer
2. Persuade: change evaluative consumer responses (attitude, preferences)
- Both argument-based and emotional appeals can inform and/or persuade
Two basic strategies of advertising:
1. Alpha strategies: promoting on approach motivation
a. Making the offer more attractive
2. Omega strategies: reducing an avoidance motivation
a. Reducing resistance
Hurdle #1: How consumers acquire and process information from advertising
4 basic stages from low effort, unconscious and automatic to high effort, conscious and
deliberative:
1. Preattentive analysis
2. Focal attention
3. Comprehension
4. Elaborative reasoning
Covaries with consumer involvement/engagement
- Involvement is a feature of the consumer, not a product (e.g. expensive is not
necessarily high involvement)
- Involvement is high when you are super interested in the product and the product is
very relevant for you personally
Preattentive analysis
Preattentive analysis:
- General, non-goal directed surveillance of the environment
- Incidental exposure to advertising
- Unconscious
- Why relevant? = far from trivial for advertisers: especially suitable for ad placement
strategies
Hemispheric lateralization: specialization in function brain hemisphere
- Left: text processing
- A textual ad benefits from being processed by the left hemisphere = so place
it right
- Right: picture processing
- A pictorial ad benefits from being processed by the right hemisphere = so
place it left
, - Left visual view feeds the right hemisphere, the right visual view feeds the left
hemisphere
Focal attention
Focal attention: process by which information is brought into short term, working memory
where it becomes the object of conscious attention
- When involvement turns from low to moderate
- So when we actively focus on things and start noticing them
- Voluntary attention: when the consumer decides what he will look at, process and
what he will not
- Involuntary attention: when the consumer starts having attention for stuff beyond his
or her will
Factors promoting involuntary focal attention:
- Salience: extent to which variable is noticeably different from its environment: extent
of experienced contrast
- Vividness: extent to which information is emotionally interesting, concrete/image
provoking and proximate
- Novelty: extent of newness, frequently a function of extent to which information
disconfirms pre existing consumer expectations
- Two sided ad: an add that does not only have positive factors, but also
negative bits of information about the product/brand
Comprehension
Comprehension: once we notice things, can we make sense of them?
- Starts with either believing (accepting) or not believing (not accepting) incoming
information
- An initial, unconsciousness, spontaneous response
- Seeing is believing: a truth effect
- When we perceive any new information, our first, gut response is to believe
what we see, hear, read etc
- And this effect becomes stronger when the information is repeated, and the
consumer is not on full alert
Elaborative reasoning
What all advertisers want, but what is seldom achieved
- From moderate to high involvement
- Completely conscious
Elaborative reasoning: active, conscious inference making:
- E.g. linking what you just learned about a brand through an ad to what you already
know about the brand in your memory, and so creating new ideas, beliefs, attitudes
etc (or updating old ones)
- Prevalence (the extent to which consumers do it) frequently overestimated by
advertisers = do not overestimate this stage
- Rare phenomenon, since we are exposed with 1000 stimulus, we do not have the
time/motivation/capacity to do this
- We only do this when the matter is really important to them
