Marketing Communications Lectures (Complete)
Tilburg University
Master Marketing Management
Lecture 1: breaking through the advertising clutter
Attention
This picture is taken in Times Square. Why is this
situation the example to start this lecture with?
Answer: Because this shows you need to differentiate
your advertisement. What we see here is that the
advertisements are screaming for attention. But
attention is a limited resource, we cannot pay
attention to everything. We as consumers are
automatically drawn to advertisement that is salient
for instance. In the exam this would be an example of
trying to increase involuntary attention in order to
deal with all the clutter and so on.
Examples:
1. The “Duracell Bunny” campaigns What explains the success of these Duracell campaigns?
Answer: First, it increases involuntary attention because it’s new information, it is all the time a new
commercial. Second, it builds the associative network. All the time Duracell has the bunny, but new
various information is used to that variability.
2. Pringels packaging as a “smart” communication strategy Packaging is also a form of marketing
communication. Why is this effective? It increases involuntary attention because packaging is
different from all others and is therefore salient. It uses unexpected salient packaging.
3. Find the “Maes barrel” Challenge where consumers were asked to find the barrel of Maes. Why
is this effective? By using this campaign, you actually install some kind of buzz, which increases
sensory proximity because people around you are talking about it. Second, the spatial proximity: the
barell is quite close to you, in the city that you know. This campaign tries to increase the proximity,
increase WOM-communication and the product is also brought close to you.
Attention
The reception of “stimuli”.
There are 4 dimensions of attention. Attention is:
1. Selective: this is either conscious or unconscious. When a
stimulus is really salient, we cannot deny it and automatically
draw our attention to it. When something is really relevant to
you, you’ll consciously draw attention to it.
, 2. Voluntary or involuntary: they will selectively attend in a voluntary or involuntary basis.
3. Limited (as are the amount of mental resources): consumers have a limited source of
attention to allocate to stimuli. They cannot attend to everything. There is also a limited
amount of mental and cognitive resources and that’s the reason why we selectively attend to
stimuli.
4. A precondition for further processing more attention means more “elaboration”.
Why is this all relevant to marketing and marketing communication? Because attention is a
precondition for further processing. And if you look at the stages of information processing,
we see there’s pre-attention which requires very little resources. Then we something comes
up that is relevant and attracts our attention, we devote focal attention and then we try to
comprehend what is going on and then elaborate.
pre-attention focal attention comprehension elaboration
People have limited cognitive capacity to attend to and think about information.
Levels of processing (Greenwald and Heavitt, 1984):
Pre-attention: little or no capacity required to pre-attend the stimuli, automatic processing
Focal-attention: little capacity required (when something is relevant to us)
Comprehension: modest levels of capacity required
Elaboration: substantial levels of capacity required
More attention means more capacity to comprehend and elaborate on information (and better
recall). If people form opinions based on a very deep elaboration, the attitudes are more stable.
The Challenge: Avoiding Advertising Avoidance
The challenge in MarCom is try to stand to and avoid advertising avoidance. Consumers actively
decide NOT to attend to commercial messages. Because resources are limited, first we cannot attend
to everything (automatic unconscious) but next to that we also actively avoid because
advertisements can be intrusive and annoying.
Zipping and zapping
“do not call me” lists (tele-selling)
Ad blockers
People learn to actively avoid commercial messages, such as banners and sponsored results. This has
to do with the fact that resources are limited and also because learn to selectively attend. Ad
avoidance is a bigger problem for online compared to offline media:
Information overload: Because consumers usually have specific goals when browsing, online
ads perceived as more intrusive. They’ll also have beliefs about the fact that if you attend to
much to the advertisement, that you will be disrupted.
Pagendarm & Schaumburg (2001): consumers’ navigation style matters: Banner blindness is
higher when people are looking for information vs. when they are just browsing
Selective attention: People train themselves in recognizing commercial messages (such as
banners and sponsored search results), such that they can actively avoid.
,Paper: There are three main
reasons why people avoid
advertisements on the internet.
1. Because people believe that
advertising on the internet
impedes their goals, thus actually
hinders what they are doing. The
more that people believe that
advertisement hinders their goals,
the more that they will actively
avoid advertisement.
2. Perceived advertising clutter:
people believe that in general that
the internet full of advertisements
that are not relevant and so on.
The more that people believe that,
the more that they will actively avoid advertisements on the internet.
3. Prior negative experience: people learn from clicking on ads. The more that you know that clicking
on an advertisement leads to nowhere, the more that they will avoid advertisement in the future.
This paper is compulsory of this course. What the teacher wants you to know for the exam: this
schedule (not the beta coefficients or the link between those). You should know the general rational,
that there are three reasons that explain advertisement avoidance. And that perceived goal
impediment is actually also consists of three other dimensions is also important. And that perceived
ad cutter exists of excessiveness, exclusiveness and irritation. Also, those of prior experiences.
How Campaigns Can Stand Out
How can marketing communications “increase” comprehension and elaboration (and hence stand
out)?
1) Increase attention (attention effect)
So that more resources are allocated to the stimulus
Stimulate involuntary attention: the unconscious orienting response that we automatically
draw.
Stimulate voluntary attention: we have to make sure that information is quite relevant, so
that we actually decide to pay even more attention (focal attention) to something.
2) Increase ease of processing (memory effect)
So that less resources are needed to comprehend and elaborate on the stimulus
if we make use of people’s existing memory, we can assure that people will elaborate the
information much better later on.
Stimulating Involuntary Attention
The idea of involuntary attention is that stimuli that might be relevant, but are not necessarily
relevant, but are weird, unexpected, possibly interesting or threathing behavior. This automatically
attracts an orienting response and then you decide (consciously or unconsciously) if it is worth paying
attention to.
, A number of communication cues can trigger/increase involuntary attention, Cialdini calls these
attractors:
1. Salient & novel stimuli: they are hard to ignore and
basically stand out. They draw attention in a very
unconscious/involuntary way. They will elicit a very mild
psychological arousal. It has to do with a small state of
activation that actually leads to possibly paying more
attention.
2. Centrally located stimuli: Horizontal centrality
3. Stimuli presented first: Primacy effects
4. Picture Superiority: Pictoral vs. text vs. brand?
Automatic orienting response
Cialdini (2016) calls this “attractors”
pre-suasion in the sense that we have to attract attention. And voluntary attention he calls
it magnetizers (devote more resources).
1. Salient Stimuli
novel, unexpected, and original stimuli (Pieters, Warlop, and Wedel 2002)
related to life and death (Cialdini 2017) Sexual stimuli, Threatening stimuli. If you look
from an evolutionary perspective, things that are related to life and death are important to
us and might be relevant or threatening. Which is why they actually call for an orienting
response. They lead to higher elaboration because they elicit a small mild state of arousal.
stick out and are hard to ignore
attract attention involuntary, so that more capacity will be allocated when processing the
corresponding stimulus
they elicit an orienting response, resulting in
mild psychological arousal
physical orientation toward the source of stimulation (i.e., focal attention)
Novelty example: we have the tendency to pay attention to things that are neutral (?). Imagine that
you are browsing a magazine and you are interested in reading and you suddenly see an
advertisement from ikea. And you will see a small variation, you will pay more attention to this
compared to when exactly the same advertisement would have been shown. Small levels of
variation/novelty (things we are not really familiar with).
Arousal as mediator:
Arousal: a state of wakefulness or alertness
Arousal affects cognitive capacity:
Arousal is activation that leads to later on the allocation of
more or less cognitive resources to processing stimuli. We
need moderate levels of arousal in order to process
information. This is called the Yerkes-Dodson law. Very high
level of arousal will actually lead to low level cognitive
capacity, this is why if advertisers elicit too much fear (In
fear appeals) you make your customer too afraid that they
actually will prevent processing.
