Introduction
Advertising is a process of persuading an audience to buy products, contract services, or support a candidate or issue. Advertising creates a reality for the consumer—both the image of the product, company, or candidate and the need for a product or service. Advertisements try to change consumer attitudes toward a product, company, or candidate. Attitudes consist of three components: belief, affect (emotion), and intention to act. The ultimate goal of the advertiser is to persuade the consumer to act—to buy the product, support the candidate or company, or use the service.
Advertising is one form of mass communication. A classified ad from around 1000 b.c.e. offered a reward (a gold coin) to anyone finding and returning a runaway slave. Johannes Gutenberg, an inventor and metallurgist, invented movable type in the fifteenth century, which allowed for the printed mass communication of advertising. The Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century cultivated commercialism and transportation of national publications, including a large number of magazines. Advertising proliferated on radio after 1920, on television after 1945, and on the Internet starting in the mid-1990s.
Psychologists study advertising as a form of communication in the context of cognition and psycholinguistics. Consumers “read” advertisements, whether in print, on television, or online, similarly to the way they read books. Therefore, one way to examine how consumers understand and react to advertisements is by researching comprehension of narrative scripts. For advertisements to effectively change consumer attitudes, their message must be understood. Psychologists study how consumers process the information in the advertisement. Sometimes information processing leads to miscomprehension which, often unintentionally, can create in the consumer false ideas about the product.
From a more social cognitive and humanistic perspective, psychologists look at the appeals advertisers make to human needs. Advertisements associate basic needs and natural responses to those needs with their products. Advertisers classically condition consumers to respond to their products as they would to any stimulus naturally satisfying a need. Sometimes these associations are not consciously made.
Narrative Script
The first step in changing consumer attitudes toward an advertised product is to persuade the consumer that the informational content of the advertisement is true. One way advertisers create belief in the consumer is to follow a narrative script, a simple plot such as a child might hear when a parent reads a story.
The narrative script is a knowledge structure composed of exposition, complication, and resolution. The exposition introduces the characters and settings of the story. The complication is a developing problem. The resolution is the solution to the problem. Many advertisements take the form of the narrative script to facilitate comprehension and belief. For example, John, Jane, and their daughter Judy are playing at the park (exposition). While swinging, Judy falls on the ground, scraping her knee (complication). Jane soothes Judy and dresses her wound by applying a plastic bandage coated with an antibacterial agent (resolution). The consumer is comfortable with the narrative script as an understandable and entertaining format. The advertiser is able to hold the audience’s attention. The resolution is associated with the product (bandages).
Information Processing
The consumer’s belief in the advertisement is affected by how the consumer processes the information presented in it. There are eight stages of information processing involved in the comprehension of advertisements. The belief component of the consumer’s attitude toward the product can be formed or modified at any stage. The first stage is exposure. The consumer must have the opportunity to perceive the advertisement. The second stage is attention. The consumer may pay attention to part or all of an advertisement. The third stage is comprehension. The consumer must understand the information in the ad. The fourth stage is evaluation. The consumer assesses the information presented in the ad. The fifth stage is encoding. The consumer encodes, or saves, the advertised information in long-term memory. Later, the sixth stage, retrieval, can occur: The consumer retrieves the encoded information. The seventh stage is decision. The consumer decides to buy (or not buy) the advertised product. The final stage is the action of buying the product.
Miscomprehension
Advertisers may persuade consumers to buy their product by intentionally inducing miscomprehension. The basis of the miscomprehension is the tendency for people to encode inferences, or interpretations, of stated advertising claims. Therefore, the consumer later remembers inferences made, but not explicitly stated, about a product. At no point is the advertiser presenting false information. However, the advertisement is structured in a way that induces the consumer to draw a specific inference. An advertisement might use hedge words such as “may” or “could.” For example, pain reliever Brand A “may help” prevent heart attacks.
Other advertisements contain elliptical comparatives. In an elliptical comparison, the standard that something is being compared to is intentionally left out. The consumer naturally completes the comparison with the most logical standard. However, the true standard might not be the most logical. For example, cereal Brand A “gives you more.” More what? A logical standard might be “more vitamins.” The true standard might be “more heartburn.” An advertisement might imply causation when in actuality the relationship is correlational. Juxtaposing two imperative statements implies that the first statement leads to, or causes, the next statement: Buy tire Brand A. Drive safely.
Psychological Appeals
Advertisers use psychological appeals directed to basic human needs. Abraham Maslow, the American humanist psychologist who developed a hierarchy of needs in the 1960s, theorized that all humans have needs that must be met to achieve self-fulfillment. The most basic are the physiological needs, such as food, water, and shelter. People also need basic feelings: feeling secure, that they belong, and that they are loved, as well as feelings of self-esteem. The final need is self-actualization, the highest form of self-fulfillment. Advertisements may focus on any one, or combinations, of these needs.
Psychological appeals in advertising influence the emotional component of people’s attitudes. The advertised product is associated with positive emotions such as fun, love, belonging, warmth, excitement, and satisfaction. Advertisements can also be based on fear: The advertisers try to convince consumers that there will be negative consequences if they do not buy their product, focusing on the need for safety. For example, buying any tire other than the one advertised will increase the risk of an automobile accident. Advertisements also appeal to the human need for self-esteem, which is heightened through power and success. An ad may aim to associate the product with the consumer being the best or having the most.
Classical Conditioning
Russian physiologist Ivan Petrovich Pavlov discovered the process of classical conditioning
in the early twentieth century. An unconditioned stimulus
(US) produces naturally an unconditioned response (UR). For example, the image of a baby may naturally produce pleasant, even maternal or paternal, feelings. In classical conditioning, the unconditioned stimulus is paired with a neutral stimulus (one that does not normally produce the unconditioned response). For example, a can of soda (neutral stimulus) can be paired with a picture of a baby (unconditioned stimulus). With several pairings, the neutral stimulus will become the conditioned stimulus, eliciting the unconditioned response without the actual association with the unconditioned stimulus. Once conditioning occurs, the unconditioned response becomes the conditioned response (CR).
Thus, the can of soda becomes the conditioned stimulus when it alone produces pleasant feelings (conditioned response). Advertisers use classical conditioning to associate a product with a stimulus that elicits the desired responses (belief in the product, positive emotions about the product, intent to buy the product) in the consumer. While shopping, a consumer sees the advertised can of soda, associates it with positive feelings, and therefore is more likely to purchase this brand of soda.
Subliminal Advertising
Stimuli that are subliminal are below the threshold of conscious perception. Consumers are not normally aware of subliminal stimuli unless they consciously look for them. For example, an image on a product package may contain the shape of sexual organs. There is some weak evidence that subliminal messages in advertising may positively affect the emotional quality of consumer attitudes toward a product. However, there is no evidence that subliminal messages affect consumer behavior toward a product.
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