More about attitudes and social norms Flashcards
(28 cards)
What did Kilbourne, 1999 say about advertising?
‘Almost everyone holds the misguided belief that advertisements don’t affect them, don’t shape their attitudes, don’t help define their dreams, but that it works on other people’
Give figures to support the statement that advertising is a big business
- UK companies spend more than 14 billion a year on advertising
- Almost half a million advertising and marketing jobs in the UK economy
- One million UK jobs depend on advertising. Take up 70% of British Newspaper space.
What was the old definition of advertising (Bovee, 1992; Belch and Belch , 2004) ?
any form of non-personal paid communication aimed to inform and/or persuade target audiences about a product, services or idea
Why is Bovee’s definition of advertising outdated?
Advertising has become increasingly targeted and personal
What is Petty and Cacioppo’s (1986) Elaboration Likelihood Model: Dual Process Model of Persuasion?
• Either:
- Source message (input) -> High ability and motivation (processing strategy) -> central route -> Persuasion (output)
- Source message (input) -> low ability or motivation -> peripheral route -> Persuasion (output)
• Basic idea that there are two routes of persuasion: central route and the peripheral route
What is the central route of persuasion?
involves carefully attending to an argument/ carefully thinking about a message in an advert and systematically scrutinizing the information contained in the advert
What is the process of thinking about the message in an advert called and when is it post frequent?
- The process of thinking about the message is called ‘Elaboration’ and is most frequent when:
1. The consumer is highly motivated
2. The consumer is high in ability
What is the Peripheral persuasion route?
- We very often do not think carefully about (i.e. elaborate on) the message
- Often we do NOT follow Central Route (cognitively lazy, fatigued, time pressure, product is trivial, low motivation, low ability)
- We may not even attend to the message consciously at all but we still take in some content subconsciously
- Persuasion then can also result from peripheral cues in the target message
What are some cues that tend to influence behaviour via the peripheral route?
- Social proof
- Mere exposure
- Humour
- Perceived Scarcity
What was Cialdini’s (2001) experiment about the bandwagon effect and tipping behaviour and what were the results?
- Cialdidi (2001): Asked music students to busk in the street (sing and play guitar)
- In one condition the guitar case was empty. In the second condition the guitar case had been purposefully filled with money
- Waited to see how much money the busker made (DV). Repeated trials over different days to control for time of day, weather etc.
- Found that buskers with money already in guitar case made more money
- Study shows we use the behaviour of the majority to guide out behaviour. We ‘jump in the bandwagon’
What did Cialdini (2007) say in regards to the bandwagon effect?
People have an innate drive to copy others; decisions and behaviour
What did Forsyth (2018) say in regards to the bandwagon effect?
Being part of a group/ following the behaviours of others, helps reduce risk and is (normally) beneficial for survival
What are social norms in advertising?
- E.g. 9 out of 10 people recommend something
- Social norms use social influence to persuade people to ‘jump on the bandwagon’ get with the majority. Uses informational and normative social influence.
What was Joerg and Kwon’s (2012) experiment to test the effectiveness of the bandwagon effect?
- Participants shown a mock-up of an online shopping page selling USB drives
- Randomly allocated to one of two conditions. Positive Social Norm condition (94% of consumers bought this product after viewing this site’) while the other half were not exposed to this claim
- Afterwards, rated purchase intention: How likely are you to buy the product (7-point scale)
- Found that more customers were likely to buy it after positive social norm conditioning
- But really hard to actually assess people’s behaviour
What is the mere exposure effect?
Psychological phenomenon by which people develop an increase in positive affect, resulting from the repeated presentation of previously unfamiliar stimuli
How is the mere exposure effect utilised in advertising?
- Suggests that consumers do not need to pay conscious attention to advertisements and it may explain why some companies use ‘minimal’ advertising strategies
- There is now research that shows that the simple repetition of images and brands is enough to generate a ‘memory trace’ in the consumer’s mind and unconsciously affect their preferences for a specific product (Shapiro, Machinnis and Heckler, 1997)
- The more consumers see a brand the more they like it
- Positive preferences can be generated independently of conscious processing
How is the mere exposure effect used in in game advertising?
- Company pays a game company to include the brand in their game
- Often people playing the game don’t mention that they have seen the adverts in the game
What’s Kim and Leng (2017) experiment to show the mere exposure effect of product placement?
• Kim and Leng (2017): randomly assigned participants to play a sports video game repeatedly for either (1) 12 mins, (2) 36 mins, (3) 84 mins
• These games included adverts placed around stadia/pitches
• Logic was that the longer participants played the game the more they would encounter the adverts and, in line with the mere exposure effect, the more they will like them
• Measured:
• Brand recall: what brands can you remember?
• Average recall: 1-2 brands
• Brands recognition: showed them names of 10 brands (half had been in the game and half had not and asked them to identify those in the game)
• Generally participants were better at the recognition task that the recall task. So there is an unconscious memory trace
• Participants who had played longer had a better recall
• Measured:
• Attitudes (liking) and purchase intention (willingness to buy):
- Found that those who played the games for longest were more likely to have more positive attitudes and were more likely to purchase the product.
What’s Fang et al. experiment about the mere exposure effect in regards to banner ads
• Fang et al. asked Ps to read an article on online education with banner ads rotating around article for five seconds
• Some of the ads were presented either 0 times, 5 times or 20 times
• When liking for the different banner ads were assessed at the end, frequency of exposure had a significant positive effect on attitudes
- Important to remember that we wouldn’t be consciously attending to banner ads but it would be in your peripheral vision
What do researchers generally agree that humour is?
A pleasurable experience that arises from an idea or event that is in some sense incongruous (e.g. Alden, Mukerjee and Hoyer, 2000)
How many television ads contain humour appeals? (Bear 2005; Alden, Hoyer and Lee 1993)
about 1/5
What is the incongruity-resolution theory
- Most common type of humour used in adverts (Alden, Hoyer, Lee 1993)
- Exists when the meaning of the advert is not immediately clear. When the meaning is eventually determined the result is misattributed as a pleasant sensation and a more favourable attitude towards the advert (Flaherty, Weinberger and Gulas 2004)
- The pleasure derived from incongruity is the divergence from expectation and the greater the divergence the funnier the material
How effective is humour in advertising?
- Humour increases consumers’ recall of events in advertisements (Cline and Kellaris, 2007) – BUT not necessarily the brand/product
- Humour enhances liking of both the advertisement and the advertised brand (O’Guinn, Allen and Semenik, 2000)
- Humour lowers resistance to advertising and tops critical evaluation (O’Guinn, Allen and Semenik, 2000)
- Depends on demographics and the product
What is the theory behind scarcity appeals?
Scare items often tend to be valuable and in turn people appear to perceive value in items that are scarce
