Psychology of Advertising
Lecture 1
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Advertising is any form of paid communication by an identified sponsor aimed to inform
or persuade a target audience. Within the world of publicity, advertisers are the ones sending
information about a specific product, whereas consumers are the receivers of information and the
target audience.
We are exposed to approximately 1,000 ads per day. This is something we have grown
used to without realizing it. In the past (circa 1960), advertising was focused on informing
consumers completely about the product. Publicity contained more texts with full explanations
about what was being sold. Nowadays, advertising aims to make you associate the brand and
product with positive emotions; there’s a focus on affect.
Several functions within advertising have thus been added through time. These are;
● The sponsoring of events, programs, newspapers, etc
● Employment
● Persuasion
● Information ( → used to be the only function)
The persuasion function attempts to have three different types of effects on you, also
named the ABC effect. These are;
1. Affective. This is made to increase your liking and positive emotional response to the
product.
2. Behavioral
3. Cognitive. Advertising wants you to recognize and remember the brand/product and
motivates you to change your beliefs about it.
According to the DAGMAR model, there is a hierarchy and order in the effects of
advertising. It shows which stages you go through before understanding, liking, and buying a
product. The model assumes that people always pay attention to ads and are involved and aware
of advertising. It suggests the following steps in which we gradually reach the objectives that the
company aimed for;
Defining → Advertising → Goal → Measured → Advertising → Result
Another theory, the FCB grid, assumes that there are three things that can result from
advertising that can be categorized through the dimensions of emotion and involvment. These are
, thinking, feeling, and doing. Depending on the product presented, the three actions have a
different order. If a product is more informative and requires high involvement, we will be more
likely to 1. Think 2. Feel 3. Do . However, when a product is more emotional in nature and does
not require a lot of cognitive thoughts (e.g chocolate), we will be more likely to follow the order
of 1. Do 2. Feel 3. Think.
The processing of advertising messages and information presented to us follows
gradual phases in our cognitions. These are;
1. The preattentive analysis stage. We incidentally come across advertisements and
products. We do not give it much attention, but it still impacts us unconsciously.
Information gets into our implicit memory which we can retrieve. There few concepts
below are important in this stage.
Perceptual and conceptual processing are two types of processing that the
preattentive analysis stage can rely on. The perceptual analysis of something involves its
physical features, whereas conceptual processing means that you actually understand
what a product is for and its usage situation. This incidental memory mainly relies on
conceptual processing; the latter facilitates memory.
Hedonic fluency is something else the preattentive analysis stage relies on. This
is the subjective ease at which a stimulus can be perceived and processed. The easier
something is to process, the more it elicits positive emotions which are attributed to the
stimulus/product.
It is important to remember that familiar stimuli are easier to process as well. This
is partly due to the mere exposure effect, which suggests that a neutral object can be
liked more if it is exposed repeatedly.
2. The focal attention stage. When something in the first stage draws our attention, we
move onto the focal attention stage. Involvement is increased a bit in this stage. We have
either voluntary or involuntary attention. Only when a stimulus is really relevant and
interesting to us, do we engage in voluntary attention. Importantly, we need to be
motivated and able to process this attention. If we do not have sufficient motivation or
capacity to process commercials, advertising can also use involuntary attention in
which stimuli need to stand out from the environment. For this, stimuli need to be (1)
salient and unique, (2) vivid and emotionally provoking, (3) novel or surprising. The
latter is due to the fact that when people feel surprised, we try to reason this and
understand why exactly we are surprised.
3. The comprehension stage. In this stage, our attention is drawn and we attempt to
understand what the commercial or product is about. Although comprehension is
important for persuasion, messages are often misunderstood. This does not have to be a
problem, due to the truth effect of advertising. This effect suggests that people tend to
uncritically accept and believe information.
