Attitudes and advertising TiU Summary
Lecture 1
Advertising in practice
Advertising is any paid communication by identified sponsors aimed to inform/persuade
target audience about organization, product, service or idea. It is ancient, adjusted to
consumer and/or product life cycle, can follow an alpha or omega approach and includes
informational, argument-based and emotional affect-based appeals.
- Alpha approach = try to get people to buy a product
- Omega approach = try to get people to not avoid buying something
A firm has an objective and wants to convey a message, that they communicate to an
advertising agency that in turn takes the following steps:
- Market research
- Develop basic concept
- Develop/fit with promotions mix
- Media planning
- Develop creative concept
- Test concept
- Evaluation
We can’t always identify if and why something works in advertising and that is where
psychology comes in.
Advertising has different functions:
- It shifts who pays for a service. YouTube has ads, but Netflix doesn’t.
- Facilitating competition. Gives an opportunity to communicate about why one brand
is better than the other.
- Communicating with consumers
- Informing consumers about what might be useful for them, but often why they need
it (persuading).
- Funding public mass media
- Creating jobs
We want to understand why advertising works so we can predict what will work in the
future. The goal is to look at an individual level. We do this by
- Relating specific advertising stimuli to specific and individual consumer responses
- Articulating the intrapersonal, interpersonal or group-level psychological processes
that are responsible for the relation between advertising stimuli and consumer
responses.
Different models of advertising
Earliest models where simple models (sales response
models) that only measures input and output (spending and
getting). They diminished returns to additional spending and
had a concave or S-shape.
,Then came the hierarchy of effects models. These add an intermediate step between
message and consumer response, by incorporating emotional aspects. But they also assume
one order and high consumer involvement. Not every consumer is always paying as much
attention as another.
- AIDA: attention -> interest -> desire -> action
- Variants: AIDCA, AIETA, AKLPCP
- DAGMAR: defining advertising goals for measured advertising results. Inform and
persuade.
- FCB: foot, cone and belding grid. Allows flexibility by
adding different levels of thinking and feeling, but
doesn’t allow for individual differences in
involvement, instead assumes per product.
All models assume sequence, passive consumer, and no
underlying processes/interactions. And in all model’s
evaluation plays a key role. When you buy a house, you
evaluate more and before you buy it. When buying candy,
you might buy it and afterwards evaluate.
Another problem with hierarchy of effects is that they describe everything for everyone
everywhere, but consumer behavior is too complex for these so called grand theories. Grand
theories are not how people work. 1 model does not explain everything.
In the cognitive response approach:
- Consumer is active processor of information who uses elaboration, persuasion,
resistance or neutral position.
- They connect their experience to previous experiences
- Attitude change is explained by how the person responds to the message
- Basis of dual process theories; add spectrum of involvement (if stakes are higher you
are more involved).
Replication crisis
A problem that caused the crisis was a lack of critical thinking. There were poor research
methods and statistics and a low bar for what counts as good explanation.
Social psychology sometimes “requires a suspension of disbelief”. This is not a good thing
- Explanation in terms of principle that only applies to that specific case
- Explanation mostly redescribes the phenomenon
- One word explanations
Knowledge is hard to acquire because observation is limited. We think we can observe
anything, but this is not always the case. Therefore is psychology that ignores biology
unlikely to get closer to the truth.
Foundations of psychology
- Bounded rationality
- Humans have goals
- Evolution by natural selection
,Bounded rationality was “invented” by Herbert Simon. Because of his contributions thinking
was not a mystery anymore.
Physical symbol system hypothesis: thinking is a symbol system (like a Turing
machine, black box).
Because of limits on computing speed, intelligent systems must use appropriate methods to
handle most tasks, therefore their rationality is bounded. There are limits to what we can do
so it is very likely that the system uses heuristics.
To explain this he used
The scissor metaphor: human rational behavior is like a scissors whose two blades are
the structure of task environments and the computational capabilities of the actor.
So one blade is the environment and the other the actor. It only works if they fit
together.
Humans have goals is based on the pyramid of needs and these goals have a substantial
amount of data and research behind them.
But there might be different perspectives, at different moments in life you’ll have different
goals because of emotions.
Freud suggested we might have goals we are not aware of, but Allport did not agree and
stated psychologists would be better of first recognizing the manifest motives before diving
into the unconscious. Usually people know what they are trying to achieve
Evolution by natural selection is the
only known causal process capable of
producing complex physiological and
psychological mechanisms. For years
we have done the don’ts. We have to
be careful when using natural
selection in explaining these
mechanisms.
Recap of year 1 social psychology about attitudes
An attitude is an evaluation of an attitude object, it has 3 components;
- Cognitive
- Affective
- Behavioral
They are formed based on
- Genetics
- Social learning
- Derive from own behavior (self-perception)
- Experiences (conditioning)
- Mere exposure
Attitudes are measured differently depending on if they are explicit or implicit.
- Explicit = self-report questions
- Implicit = implicit association test (response time) or physiological responses.
, Attitudes predict behavior, but not always (intention-
behavior gap). They are linked but don’t always
influence behavior. People sometimes change their
attitude based on behavior.
Persuasive communication:
- Yale attitude change approach = who said what
to whom
- Elaboration likelihood model of persuasion =
spectrum of involvement. High has effortful
processing with motivation. Low involvement
you are not fully able to process, and you might use shortcuts.
Strategies of social influence
Six principles of Cialdini
- Reciprocity = you feel obligated to do something back when someone has done
something for you (or giving) even if it was unwanted.
- Consistency = offer great deal and then change it (low ball) people won’t want to
back out.
- Liking = hard to say no to someone you like
- Scarcity = when something is rare you want it
- Authority = people find it hard to say no to authority
- Social proof = you take cues from people around you to see what is valuable and
what you should like (canned laughter)
Reflection on this prior knowledge:
Not fine-grained enough for developing persuasive messages
- What makes a source credible
- What makes an argument good
- Why try to persuade with non-credible source and bad argument?
Novel methods = methods that still have to be developed.
Lecture 2
Does advertising work
- Average effect size
- Conditions for effectiveness
- Violence and sex
Content of this lecture is based is on the papers
“How well does advertising work” article gives a meta analyses of brand advertising
elasticities. They found the following.
- Average short term was .12
- Average long term was .24
- It declined over time
