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16/10/2019 09:54:40 AM

Key Psychological Processes in Advertising

To complete our consideration of the consumer as a thoughtful decision maker, one key issue remains. We need to examine the explicit psychological consequences of advertising. What is it that advertising leaves in the minds of consumers that ultimately may influence their behavior?

Attitude is defined as an overall evaluation of any object, person, or issue that varies along a continuum, like favorable to unfavorable or positive to negative. Attitudes are learned, and if they are based on substantial experience with the object or issue in question, can be held with great conviction. Brand attitudes are summary evaluations that reflect preferences for various products and brands. The Creativity Box details how marketers today, such as Coca-Cola, are using digital storytelling to build brand stories that authentically include people’s emotional feelings toward a brand.

A second idea from social psychology, beliefs, represents the knowledge and feelings a person has accumulated about an object or issue. They can be logical and factual in nature, or biased and self-serving.

Salient beliefs are a small number of key beliefs—maybe five to nine—that underline brand attitudes.

The relationship between attitudes, beliefs, and the effect of advertising can be understood by addressing the three topics below.

1.   Multi-Attribute Attitude Models (MAAMs).   

Multi-attribute attitude models (MAAMs) provide a framework and set of procedures for collecting information from consumers to assess their salient beliefs and attitudes about competitive brands. MAAMs analysis has four fundamental components:

•     Evaluative criteria are the attributes or performance characteristics that consumers use in comparing competitive brands.

•     Importance weights reflect the priority that a particular evaluative criterion receives in the consumer’s decision-making process. Importance weights can vary dramatically from one consumer to the next.

•     Consideration set is that group of brands that represents the real focal point for the consumer’s decision. For example, the potential buyer of a luxury sedan might only be focusing on Acuras, BMWs, and Saabs.

•     Beliefs represent the knowledge and feelings that a consumer has about various brands. In a MAAMs analysis, beliefs about each brand’s performance on all relevant evaluative criteria are assessed.

2.   Information Processing and Perceptual Defense. There are two major obstacles advertisers must overcome if a message is to have its intended effect.          

  • Cognitive consistency impetus: A person develops and holds beliefs and attitudes to help make efficient decisions that yield pleasing outcomes. When a consumer is satisfied with these outcomes, there is really no reason to alter the belief system. Cognitive consistency will result in the rejection of new information that challenges existing beliefs. This desire for cognitive consistency can be a major roadblock for an advertiser.
  • Advertising clutter: Clutter derives from the context—many ads of all sorts competing for attention. Even if a person wanted to, it would be impossible to process and integrate every advertising message.
  • Consumers employ perceptual defenses to simplify and control their own ad processing. Selective attention means that most ads are ignored by consumers because the brand and the message are not seen as relevant to current needs.
  • When a consumer is involved, attentive, and encounters a claim that challenges current beliefs, cognitive consistency impetus kicks in, and cognitive responses can be expected. Cognitive responses are the thoughts that occur to individuals at that exact moment in time when their beliefs and attitudes are being challenged by some form of persuasive communication. When these thoughts are negative in any way, the advertiser’s goals are not served.                                   

3.   The Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM). The basic premise of ELM is that to understand how persuasive communications may affect a person’s attitudes, we must consider his or her motivation and ability to elaborate on the message during processing. ELM uses the involvement dichotomy to describe two unique routes to attitude change: the central and peripheral route.       

  • When involvement is high, the central route is taken; when it is low the peripheral route taken. In the central route, cognitive responses lead to attitudes; in the peripheral route, peripheral cues lead to attitudes. 

a.   Shaping Attitudes via a Peripheral Route. For low-involvement products, like batteries or tortilla chips, cognitive responses to advertising claims are not expected. In such situations, attitude formation will often follow a more peripheral route, and peripheral cues become the focal point for judging the ad’s impact.

Peripheral cues are features of the ad other than the actual arguments about the brand’s performance. They include an attractive spokesperson, novel imagery, humorous incidents, or a catchy jingle.

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