Week 1
Ch1
Advertising: any form of paid communication by an identified sponsor aimed to inform
and/or persuade target audiences about an organization, product, service or idea.
- Johar ‘16: argued that the most recent developments in advertising practice,
particularly with regard to online and social media advertising, suggest that it may, or
may not be paid, and it may or may not involve an identified sponsor
McDonald & Scott (‘07): the 1st type of advertising was what we now term ‘outdoor
advertising’
- e.g., traders & merchants from ancient civilizations (Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece &
Rome)
Industrial Revolution (1730-1830) boosted advertising practice; explained by the large-scale
diffusion of the division of labour, which increasingly necessitated informing consumers of the
availability of goods and services & the massive increase in production scale
Consumer brand: the label with which to designate an individual product & differentiate it
from competitors.
Unique selling proposition (USP): summary statement used to meaningfully differentiate
the brand from the competition
Print & audio-visual media such as magazines, newspapers, television, radio and the Internet
are the key carriers of advertising messages and these media appear to be complementary
to each other rather than substitutes
McDonald & Scott (‘07): from the 1800s to the early 20th century virtually all print ads used
what we would nowadays term an informational or argument-based appeal
- ‘tell’ approach: a set of persuasive arguments to convince prospective buyers and
thus became known as the ‘reason-why approach’
- ‘soft-sell’ approach (early 1900s); sometimes used an emotional or affect based
appeal, aimed to influence the consumer’s feeling & emotions
1st: advertising facilitates competition among firms (consumer attention, consumer
preferences, choice & financial resources)
2nd: advertising is the prime means companies have to inform consumers about new &
existing products
3rd: advertising is a key source of funding for major mass media in the US and many other
countries
4th: the advertising industry is an important employer
2 important functions of advertising at the individual level:
, 1) to inform the individual consumer (emphasis on creating/influencing non-evaluative
consumer responses e.g., knowledge/beliefs)
2) to persuade the individual consumer (focus on generating/changing an evaluative
(valenced) response)
Abernathy & Franke (‘96): informational appeals are used more frequently for durable goods
than non-durable goods & in developed industrialized countries than less developed
countries
→ the most frequently communicated types of information are about performance,
availability, components and attributes, price, quality and special offers
Product life cycle: diffusion/spreading of a product across the marketplace form its initial
introduction to its decline & ultimate demise
- Introduction stage: brand awareness (creating conscious knowledge that the brand
exists & represents a specific product) & induce product trial
- Growth stage: focus on building marketshare, vis-a-vis the competition by improving
the product or developing brand extensions & communicating them to the consumer
- Maturity stage: consolidating marketshare; focus on creating consumer brand loyalty
and maintaining top-of-mind awareness
- Decline stage: informational appeals used to convey new and additional uses for the
product
Product recall: return product to factory for repair/refund
Persuasion function of advertising in Tellis’s (‘04) definition of advertising: “any paid message
that a firm delivers to consumers in order to make the offer more attractive to them”
Persuasion is aimed at changing such consumer responses via exposure to a
communication (Perry & Cacioppo (‘86), sometimes through the use of 1/more arguments
supporting a position by the communicator (Eagly & Chaiken ‘84)
Knowles & Linn ‘04
- Alpha strategies: serve to increase the tendency to ‘move toward the advocated
position’ & hence influence a consumer’s approach motivation
- Alpha: use of strong, compelling arguments
- Omega strategies: can persuade because they reduce/minimize the tendency to
move away from the positon and hence influence a consumer’s avoidance motivation
- Omega: reduce resistance by directly counterarguing consumer concerns
Current perspectives on advertising effectiveness (e.g., Poiesz ‘89)
- Naive approach: advertising must be effective, simply because it is so ubiquitous &
advertising expenditures are vast & ever increasing
- Economic approach: tries to address the effects issue by correlating advertising
expenditures with aggregated 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
- → problem: unclear what happens once a consumer is exposed to a message
, - Creative approach: a message is effective to the extent that it is well made &
creative
- Psychological approach: aims at identifying effects of advertising at the individual
level & seeks to articulate the intrapersonal, interpersonal or group-level
psychological processes that are responsible for the relationship between ad stimuli &
consumer responses
Walter D. Scott (1904): “The Psychology of Advertising”; this publication marked the
beginning of an era (advertising & consumers)
Cognitive consumer responses: beliefs & thoughts about brands, products & services that
consumers generate in response to advertising
- “traditional” ad effectiveness indices (brand awareness, brand recall & recognition,
and new associations about products & brands)
Affective responses: entail various more/less transient emotions & moods that can occur as
a function of advertising exposure & differ in valence (+/-) & intensity (i.e., arousal)
Behavioural responses: intention & actual behaviour in response to advertising (i.e., buying
product, choosing brand etc.)
To infer that A causes B, 3 conditions must be met:
1. the antecedent (A) must precede the consequence (B)
2. changes in the antecedent must be associated with changes in the consequence
3. no other explanation for the change in consequence must be present than the change
in antecedent
- Antecedent: independent variable
- Consequence: dependent variable
Mediation analysis: attempts to identify the intermediary psychological processes that are
responsible for the effects of an independent variable on the dependent variable.
Baron & Kenny (‘86); to demonstrate mediation:
1. the independent variable had an impact on the assumed mediator
2. variations in the mediator significant accounted for variation in the dependent variable
3. controlling for the mediator significantly reduced/eliminated the impact of the
independent variable on the dependent variable
Factorial experiments: 2/more variables are manipulated within the same design
Moderators: individual differences/contextual variables that affect the strength or even
change the direction of the effect of the independent on the dependent variable
- moderation would be demonstrated if the interaction effect between arguments &
involvement (AxC) on attitudes (B) would be significant
Argument quality: what is communicated about the product and thus to the
strength/persuasiveness of the arguments used to support a position or offer
