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Advertising Management and Sales Promotion Unit 3

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Unit 3 Understanding Persuasive
Advertising Message
Structure:
3.1 Introduction
Objectives
3.2 Attention
3.3 Interpretation and the Processing of Information
Self Assessment Questions I
3.4 Learning, Persuasion and Attitude Change
Self Assessment Questions II
3.5 Theories of Advertising
Self Assessment Questions III
3.6 Summary
3.7 Terminal Questions
3.8 Answers to SAQs and TQs
3.1 Introduction
Advertising is all about selling. By nature, advertising is neither neutral nor
objective. Pleading its case through the strongest, most persuasive means,
advertising intends to inform, entertain and sell goods and services.
Occasionally, it even inspires. If advertising is about selling, then persuasion
is how we get there. Persuasion requires a sound and properly focused
advertising strategy. An advertising strategy identifies who the prospective
buyers are and defines their needs, wants and desires. Smart marketers
persuade their prospective buyers in many ways. This unit explores the
ways of persuasion and throws light on the theories of advertising. It also
deals with interpretation and the processing of information.
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Objectives:
After studying this unit, you will be able to:
Define attention.
Explain interpretation and the processing of information.
Explain learning, persuasion and attitude change.
Explain the theories of advertising.
3.2 Attention
I'm always ready for a conversation about attention, says a Marketing
Executive. If you want customers for your business/product/service, you
first need their attention - and perhaps more importantly - you need to give
them your attention.
Christopher Carfi at the Social Customer Manifest and J ohn Hagel of Edg
Perspectives with J ohn Hagel (along with others) have come up with lots of
attention-grabbing insights at the Innovation Marketing Conference.
First, let us learn J ohn Hagel's 3 A's of Attention:
Attract Have customers seek you out.
Assist How do you assist customers, pre and post purchase?
Affili ate Mobilize complementary resources to deliver more value.
To this list we may would add Associate Give your customers a
mechanism to find each other (and your employees) and share interests.
And Christopher Carfi's 4 insights:
Trust The most trusted person is "a person like me." Attention is
given to those who are trusted. Determining affinity between vendor and
customer, or members of a customer community, is a critical
precondition in gaining trust.
Scarcity and exclusivity may focus attention. (Think about the "red
velvet rope" at the trendy club of your choice.) The flipside of this is that
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exclusivity, especially fake exclusivity, is fashion and the attention fades
once the bloom is off the rose.
Attention is contextual The degree of an attention given to a
particular vendor, customer or situation will also be affected by the
competing alternatives for that attention at that moment in time.
The attention gap Attention between vendor and customer is not
always symmetric. In other words, there are times when a customer is
giving a great deal of attention to the vendor ("I have a critical issue and
need to fix this right now!") and the vendor is giving little or no human
attention to the customer ("Thank you for your call...your call is very
important to us...your average wait time is '10' minutes...."). Be careful,
because when this imbalance occurs the customer gets frustrated and
becomes dissatisfied with the relationship.
And all this leads us to think about advertising. Advertising is a monorail -
there are no trains for the customers to get advertising's attention. That has
to change. Advertising is nothing more than a message, with no personal
meaning behind it. Advertising will become more about a real relationship
with the customer, with real knowledge behind it. DNA advertising is in
Over the Counter advertising is out.
3.3 Interpretation and the Processing of Information
Interpretation seeks to bring out, within the confines of the analytic method,
the latent meaning of a subject's words and behaviour; its aim is to reveal
unconscious desires and the defensive conflicts that are linked to them.
Technically, interpretation consists in making manifest this latent meaning,
in accordance with the rules dictated by the various phases of the treatment.
The first version of the theory of interpretation was delineated by Sigmund
Freud in his Psychoanalytic Study of Dreams (1900) and is applicable to
other products of the unconscious, such as paraphrases, slips of the tongue,
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and symptoms. For Freud, psychoanalysis was an art of interpretation, but
he preferred the term "construction" as a description of the core of the
psychoanalytical method, that is, the unveiling of the unconscious. This
"construction" of the unconscious is entirely a matter of applying successive
interpretations to the different aspects of a case. The interpretations allow
an overall perspective to emerge and thus define a strategy for the
treatment; however, it might also be tactically necessary at times to adjust to
unforeseen developments.
Interpretation is not just a matter of what needs to be expressed and its
actual utterance: it conveys its own meaning, one that disturbs that
defensive arrangements meant to maintain the effectiveness of repression.
Care must be taken not to provide a premature "translation" of unconscious
content, as these risks discourage the patient, reinforce his resistance and
create a purely intellectualized understanding. Firstly, the affects associated
with these defensive structures need to come to expression, and this implies
a struggle of wills. While interpretation is characterized by the necessary
intelligibility of its formulations its reductiveness as well as by its
closeness to manifest representation, generalization, and theorization, it
also has a darker and more complex dimension that relates to the polysemy
of language, personal symbolism, or the history of the affects involved.
Bringing out these affects opens up an economic dimension in which
instinctual energy forces the representation into the open. This is made
possible, first of all, through the workings of the transference and the
counter-transference.
In "The Dynamics of Transference," Freud insisted that interpretation should
not begin before the appearance of the transference, and specified that the
goal in interpreting the patient's transference is "to compel him to fit these
emotional impulses into the nexus of the treatment and of his life-history, to
submit them to intellectual consideration and to understand them in the light
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of their psychical value. This struggle between the doctor and the patient,
between intellect and instinctual life, between understanding and seeking to
act, is played out almost exclusively in the phenomena of transference. It is
on this field that victory must be won."
What the interpretations communicate to the patient in terms of the
construction of the unconscious, and on the basis of the transference, is
not dissociable from the analyst's reconstruction which is based on the
analysis of his own counter-transference. The analyst responds to the
transference demands with only a minimum of authority, allowing him to
make the counter-transference into a tool for exploring the unconscious of
the patient. For Freud, the unconscious of the patient is consequently
revealed through the unconscious of the analyst.
The primary goal of interpretation is the lifting of resistance: the cure is not
the result of a premature recognition of whatever has been repressed, but
occurs through a victory over the resistances at the source of this ignorance.
Thanks to the love-transference and the psychoanalyst's patience, the
analyst should be able to accept the psychoanalyst's "translation" without
these revelations about their unconscious adding to their conflicts or
symptoms. Freud rejected any interpretation that is isolated from the
symbolic material issuing from the unconscious, and indicated that it would
be a mistake to think that the interpretation of dreams is central to all
analyses.
As Michel Fain wrote, "While the turning of 1920 [Beyond the Pleasure
Principle, 1920] shattered the Meta psychology of 1915, conceptions from
the first topic continued to influence Freud's conception of interpretation."
(1983). It would seem useful to emphasize the necessary complementarity
of the two topics, neither being able alone to account for the theoretical role
of interpretation.
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"The path that starts from the analyst's construction ought to end in the
patient's recollection; but it does not always lead so far. If the analysis is
carried out correctly, we produce in him an assured conviction of the truth of
the construction which achieves the same therapeutic result as a recaptured
memory."
Interpretation has recently become one of the latest focuses in the
epistemological debate over the status of psychoanalysis. The
"experimental" point of view, in which interpretation is conflated with a
generalizable scientific truth that results from verifiable protocols and can be
duplicated within the context of multidisciplinary research, includes certain
models from psychoanalytical theory, comparing them with other
developmental models or conceptual tools from psychopathology.
Conversely, the "hermeneutic" point of view results in a purely relative,
narrative, and pragmatic conception of truth, whereby the interpretation is
only a new version of the life story that makes the patient feel better.
Consequently it tends towards a language of action that valorizes the
conscious dimension. Highlighting the narrative point of view obviously
involves challenging the status of Meta psychology, but the "scientific" point
of view ultimately leads to the same tendency.
A closely related notion, often mentioned when clinical cases are being
discussed, is that of "intervention." It is often used by default, when the
analyst wants to utter words that are deemed appropriate, without the
elements of the construction justifying those words being clearly
established. It is given that analysts do not merely proffer interpretations
during the session in addition, they may request a clarification, verify an
element already referred to in the treatment, encourage the patient to
continue speaking, and the like.
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However, because of the transferential situation, it is impossible to predict
the outcome of these interventions, whose inoffensive, innocent, or
insignificant character cannot be affirmed a priori. J ean Cournut has
criticized the illegitimacy of this notion, adding that, in his view, "the term
'intervention' should be eradicated from the lexicon of psychoanalysis."
Processing typically describes the act of taking something through an
established and usually routine set of procedures to convert it from one form
to another, as a manufacturing procedure, such as processing milk into
cheese. Processing can also refer to administrative procedure such as
processing paperwork to grant a mortgage loan.
Processing can refer to:
Information processing
Data processing
Signal processing
Word processing
Geometry processing
Processing (programming language)
Information processing
Information processing may be defined as the manipulation of data to
produce useful information. Over the past several years, the explosion of
sophisticated computer software has dramatically changed the way
computer users create documents. When word processing, spreadsheet,
and database software packages first became available to the public in the
late 1970s and early 1980s, they were very different. The user interface,
menus, and procedures were quite different depending on the program. As
the years passed and computer software became more sophisticated, the
software programs began to share many common features. Today,
computer software not only shares common features, it is extremely
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compatible that is, information created in one software package can be
shared with that of another.
In today's modern office, computer documents often require that a
combination of software packages be used together. For example, it might
be necessary to place a spreadsheet in a word-processing document or a
spreadsheet graph on one of the slides in a presentation file. This ability to
integrate software applications is one of the most useful features of using
Microsoft Windows and other software designed to be used in the Windows
environment.
Integration simply means the sharing of information among applications.
Windows allows the user to use different software packages as if they were
parts of a single program. Shelley, Cashman, and Vermaat (2000) explain
that integrating these software programs allows the user to move quickly
among applications and transfer text and graphics easily. The Windows
environment offers three ways that information can be integrated: (1) the
clipboard, (2) linking objects, and (3) embedding objects.
The Clipboard Copying, Cutting, and Pasting
Software running in the Windows environment makes it very easy to copy
and move text from one software application to another. The user can copy
or move text, graphics, or other objects from one place to another using the
clipboard application. For example, a chart created in Excel could be copied
and pasted into a written report created in Word. To complete this procedure
successfully, the user must first select the desired text or object. Then the
user may choose to copy or cut (move) the selected text from the edit menu.
Shortcuts usually exist for these two commands, such as clicking a button
on the toolbar. If the user copies the selected text, an exact copy of the
original text will be placed on the clipboard. If the user cuts the text,
however, the original text will be moved to the clipboard. Text that is placed
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on the clipboard will stay there until it is pasted somewhere else. To paste
the information, the user selects the paste option from the edit menu. It is
important to remember that only one object can be stored on the clipboard
at a time. When a new object is copied or cut to the clipboard, whatever
information was previously there will be removed.
Because multiple software programs (applications) can run at the same time
in Windows, the user can place information on the clipboard, open another
program, and paste the information in the desired location in the new
program. This method is the simplest and most frequently used for sharing
information among software applications.
Copying/cutting and pasting among different applications has several
advantages. This procedure saves time, eliminates keying errors, and
allows the user to tie various applications together as if they were part of a
single program.
Linking Information between Programs
Some limitations exist in using the clipboard to copy and move information
between applications. Once the information has been pasted from the
clipboard to the new location, all ties between the original source document
and the pasted information cease to exist. The destination document, which
contains the pasted information, will not be automatically updated if any
changes are made to the original source document. This limitation creates a
problem in many of today's fast-paced work environments. For example,
many annual reports created in word processing packages contain financial
status information that is produced in a spreadsheet package. If the financial
data are changed or updated in any way, the information that was previously
pasted into the actual word processing report would not show those
changes.
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To rectify many of these situations, Windows has developed Object Linking
and Embedding (OLE). The first OLE method, linking, allows the user to
share information among applications by creating a connection (or link)
between the original source document and the destination document. If the
source is altered after an OLE has been established, the destination
document will automatically update and show all the changes that have
been made. When data are linked between two documents in this way, the
data are not actually stored in a destination file. The destination document
stores only the information it needs to link back to the original source
document. If changes need to be made to the linked information, the
changes must be made and saved in the original source application.
Linking is very useful when there is a large group of users who need to view
the source data. These users can access the source data and then view the
updates if changes are made frequently. To link a selected object that has
already been copied to the clipboard, the user must choose the Paste
special option on the edit menu. Within this menu, the user selects the
Paste link option.
The user may find several advantages by deciding to link objects. Linking
does not waste the computer's memory or storage space because it never
duplicates information in two separate locations. Linking allows the user to
place objects such as those created in other applications or sound and
video clips into word-processing, spreadsheet, and presentation documents
that have no other options for performing such procedures.
Linking can also be very beneficial when different users have to share
computing tasks. For example, the Accounting Department might be
responsible for the creation of all spreadsheets and graphs within a
company. If the Accounting Department saves the files on the network drive,
employees throughout the company can link these spreadsheet and graph
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files into their necessary applications. If changes need to be made to the
original spreadsheet files, the accounting department would be responsible
for making these updates. When other users throughout the company open
their destination documents that contain the link, the changes can either be
automatically updated (called an automatic link) or can be updated when the
user requests it (called a manual link). Most Windows software has an
Update Now feature that allows a user to decide when to update a link. A
lock feature is also widely available in case the user does not want the link
to be accidentally updated.
One important point to remember when linking information is that the
destination document must always be able to locate the original source
document. If a destination file was copied to a floppy disk and taken to
another computer, all linked files must also be copied onto the floppy disk in
order for the links to be able to find their connections.
Embedding Objects
The second type of OLE process, embedding, is another feature of
Windows. When information from one application is embedded into another,
the information becomes part of the destination file. Although this process
requires the use of more memory, it allows the destination file to be self-
supporting. When the embedded object needs to be edited or updated, the
user must double-click on the object. This double-clicking opens the source
application file inside an editing window. All the necessary menus and
features will be available in this window for use in editing the source
information. After making the appropriate changes to the embedded object,
the user simply clicks outside of the editing window and returns to the
destination document. Because the user does not have to keep opening and
closing the source application file, a great deal of time is saved. Another
advantage of this feature is that the user can make changes in the
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embedded object and the destination file without touching the original
source document and vice versa. In keeping with linking objects, the user
must be able to access all source applications in order to make changes in
any embedded objects. The user does not, however, need to have access
to the original source application in order to print or view the destination
document. To embed an object, the user follows the same procedures as for
linking an object except that in the Paste special menu the Paste option is
selected instead of the Paste Link option.
O'Leary and O'Leary (1996) explain that embedding text or objects is often
favoured over linking objects in the following situations: (1) The size of the
file is not important; (2) users have access to source applications, but not
the original source file; and (3) the embedded data is changed only
occasionally. For example, if the user in tends to use the shared information
at a location removed from the source file, it would be necessary to embed
the object in order to edit the information. When linking, however, the user
must always have access to the source file via a network or an accessible
fixed drive.
Unfortunately, not every software program supports OLE features. If a
software package supports OLE features, it is called OLE-aware. The first
version of OLE was introduced with Windows 3.x; therefore, nearly all
software createdto run under the Windows environment is OLE-aware.
Data processing
Data processing is any computer process that converts data into
information or knowledge. The processing is usually assumed to be
automated and running on a computer. Because data are most useful when
well-presented and actually informative, data-processing systems are often
referred to as information systems to emphasize their practicality.
Nevertheless, both terms are roughly synonymous, performing similar
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conversions; data-processing systems typically manipulate raw data into
information, and likewise information systems typically take raw data as
input to produce information as output.
To better market their profession, a computer programmer or a systems
analyst that might once have referred, such as during the 1970s, to the
computer systems that they produce as data-processing systems more
often than not, nowadays refers to the computer systems that they produce
by some other term that includes the word information, such as information
systems, information technology systems, or management information
systems.
In the context of data processing, data are defined as numbers or
characters that represent measurements from observable phenomena. A
single datum is a single measurement from observable phenomena.
Measured information is then algorithmically derived and/or logically
deduced and/or statistically calculated from multiple data. (Evidence:
Information is defined as either a meaningful answer to a query or a
meaningful stimulus that can cascade into further queries.
More generally, the term data processing can apply to any process that
converts data from one format to another, although data conversion would
be the more logical and correct term. From this perspective, data processing
becomes the process of converting information into data and also the
converting of data back into information. The distinction is that conversion
doesn't require a question (query) to be answered. For example, information
in the form of a string of characters forming a sentence in English is
converted or encoded from a keyboard's key-presses as represented by
hardware-oriented integer codes into ASCII integer codes after which it may
be more easily processed by a computer not as merely raw, amorphous
integer data, but as a meaningful character in a natural language's set of
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graphemes and finally converted or decoded to be displayed as
characters, represented by a font on the computer display. In that example,
we can see the stage-by-stage conversion of the presence of and then
absence of electrical conductivity in the key-press and subsequent release
at the keyboard from raw substantially-meaningless integer hardware-
oriented data to evermore-meaningful information as the processing
proceeds toward the human being.
Conversely, that simple example for pedagogical purposes here is usually
described as an embedded system (for the software resident in the
keyboard itself) or as (operating) systems programming, because the
information is derived from a hardware interface and may involve overt
control of the hardware through that interface by an operating system.
Typically control of hardware by a device driver manipulating ASIC or FPGA
registers is not viewed as part of data processing proper or information
systems proper, but rather as the domain of embedded systems or
(operating) system programming. Instead, perhaps a more conventional
example of the established practice of using the term data processing is that
a business has collected numerous data concerning an aspect of its
operations and that this multitude of data must be presented in meaningful,
easy-to-access presentations for the managers who must then use that
information to increase revenue or to decrease cost. That conversion and
presentation of data as information is typically performed by a data-
processing application.
When the domain from which the data are harvested is a science or
engineering, data processing and information systems are considered too
broad of terms and the more specialized term data analysis is typically used,
focusing on the highly-specialized and highly-accurate algorithmic
derivations and statistical calculations that are less often observed in the
typical general business environment. This divergence of culture is exhibited
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in the typical numerical representations used in data processing versus
numerical; data processing's measurements are typically represented by
integers or by fixed-point or binary-coded decimal representations of real
numbers whereas the majority of data analysis's measurements are often
represented by floating-point representation of real numbers.
Practically all naturally occurring processes can be viewed as examples of
data processing systems where "observable" information in the form of
pressure, light, etc. are converted by human observers into electrical signals
in the nervous system as the senses we recognize as touch, sound, and
vision. Even the interaction of non-living systems may be viewed in this way
as rudimentary information processing systems. Conventional usage of the
terms data processing and information systems restricts their use to refer to
the algorithmic derivations, logical deductions, and statistical calculations
that recur perennially in general business environments, rather than in the
more expansive sense of all conversions of real-world measurements into
real-world information in, say, an organic biological system or even a
scientific or engineering system.
Signal processing
Signal processing is the analysis, interpretation and manipulation of
signals. Signals of interest include sound, images, and biological signals
such as ECG, radar signals, and many others. Processing of such signals
includes storage and reconstruction, separation of information from noise
(e.g., aircraft identification by radar), compression (e.g., image
compression), and feature extraction (e.g., speech-to-text conversion).
Signal classification
Signals can be either analog or digital, and may come from various sources.
There are various sorts of signal processing, depending on the nature of the
signal, as in the following examples.
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For analog signals, signal processing may involve the amplification and
filtering of audio signals for audio equipment or the modulation and
demodulation of signals for telecommunications. For digital signals, signal
processing may involve the compression, error checking and error detection
of digital signals.
Analog signal processing for signals that have not been digitized, as in
classical radio, telephone, radar, and television systems.
Digital signal processing for signals that have been digitized.
Processing is done by digital circuits such as ASICs, FPGAs, general-
purpose microprocessors or computers, or specialized digital signal
processor chips.
Statistical signal processing analyzing and extracting information from
signals based on their statistical properties.
Audio signal processing for electrical signals representing sound, such
as music.
Speech signal processing for processing and interpreting spoken
words.
Image processing in digital cameras, computers, and various imaging
systems.
Video signal processing for interpreting moving pictures.
Array processing for processing signals from arrays of sensors.
Word processing
This involves the use of a computer and specialized software to write, edit,
format, print, and save text. In addition to these basic capabilities, the latest
word processors enable users to perform a variety of advanced functions.
Although the advanced features vary among the many word processing
applications, most of the latest software facilitates the exchange of
information between different computer applications, allows easy access to
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the World Wide Web for page editing and linking, and enables groups of
writers to work together on a common project.
Writing is accomplished by using the computer's typewriter like keyboard.
The characters appear on the computer screen as they are typed. A finite
number of characters can be typed across the computer screen. The word
processor knows when the user has reached this limit and automatically
moves the cursor to the next line for uninterrupted typing. The position on
the computer screen where a character can be typed is marked by a
blinking cursor. The cursor can be positioned anywhere on the screen by
using the mouse, or the keys marked with arrows on the keyboard.
In addition to writing, the latest word processors provide tools to create and
insert drawings anywhere in the document. Typical features allow users to
draw lines, rectangles, circles, and arrowheads, and to add text.
Editing allows users to correct typographical errors, add new sentences or
paragraphs, move entire blocks of text to a different location, delete portions
of the document, copy text and paste it somewhere else in the document, or
insert text or graphics from an entirely different document. Most word
processing programs can automatically correct many basic typographical
errors, such as misspelled words, two successive capital letters in a word,
and failure to capitalize the first letter of the names of days and of the first
word in a sentence. Some other helpful editing tools commonly found in
word processors include an automatic spelling checker, a thesaurus, and a
grammar checker.
Formatting enables users to define the appearance of the elements in a
document, such as the font and type size of all headings and text, the left,
right, top, and bottom margins of each page, and the space before and after
sentences and paragraphs. Most word processors allow all the elements in
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a document to be formatted at once. This is accomplished by applying a
style.
Word processors are approaching the formatting power of full-featured
desktop publishing applications. The formatted page can be viewed on the
computer screen exactly as it will be printed. This is referred to as what you
see is what you get (WYSIWYG).
The latest word processors have many features for allowing groups of
people to work together on the same document. For instance, multiple
versions of a document can be saved to a single file for version control;
access levels can be assigned so that only a select group of people can
make changes to a document; edits can be marked with the date, time, and
editor's name; and text colors can be assigned to differentiate editors. In
addition, some word processors have editing features that include
highlighting text, drawing lines through text to represent deleted text, and
using red underscoring to identify changed text.
Geometry processing
Geometry processing is a fast-growing area of research that uses
concepts from applied mathematics, computer science, and engineering to
design efficient algorithms for the acquisition, reconstruction, analysis,
manipulation, simulation and transmission of complex 3D models.
Applications of geometry processing algorithms already cover a wide range
of areas from multimedia, entertainment, and classical computer-aided
design, to biomedical computing, reverse engineering, and scientific
computing.
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Processing (programming language)
Processing
Paradigm: object-oriented
Appeared in: 2001
Typing discipline: strong
Influenced by: Design by Numbers
OS: Cross-platform
License: GPL and LGPL
Website: processing.org
Processing is an open source project initiated by Casey Reas and
Benjamin Fry, formerly of the Aesthetics and Computation Group at the MIT
Media Lab. It is "a programming language and integrated development
environment (IDE) built for the electronic arts and visual design
communities", which aims to teach the basics of computer programming in a
visual context, and to serve as the foundation for electronic sketchbooks.
One of the stated aims of Processing is to act as a tool to get non-
programmers started with programming, through the instant gratification of
visual feedback. It is a language that builds on the graphical side of the J ava
programming language, simplifying features and creating a few new ones.
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Features
The Processing IDE
Processing includes a "sketchbook", a minimal alternative to an IDE for
organizing projects.
When programming is in processing, all classes defined will be treated as
inner classes when the code is translated into pure J ava before compiling.
This means that the use of static variables in classes is prohibited unless
you explicitly tell Processing that you want to code in pure J ava mode.
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Self Assessment Questions I
State whether the following statements are True or False:
1. The cursor can be positioned anywhere on the screen by using the
mouse, or the keys marked with arrows on the keyboard.
2. Processing is an open source project initiated by Casey Reas and
Benjamin Fry.
3. The formatted page can be viewed on the computer screen exactly as it
will be printed.
3.4 Learning, Persuasion and Attitude Change
Persuasion
Advertising is about selling. By nature, advertising is neither neutral nor
objective. Pleading its case through the strongest, most persuasive means,
advertising informs, entertains and sells. Occasionally, it even inspires. If
advertising is about selling, then persuasion is how we get there.
Background
Consumers are not persuaded by illogical or irrational promises and can see
through ill-conceived ideas. You might be surprised to learn that 80 to 90
percent of new products launched FAIL. Smart marketers hold the utmost
respect for their consumers in two ways: 1) delivering product quality and
2) using honest advertising. Think about yourself as a consumer for a
moment. How do you respond to the advertising you are exposed to each
day? Do you run out and buy everything you see and hear advertised? Are
you easily convinced that you absolutely need to buy a product?
You may be starting to get a sense of how difficult it is to persuade
someone. Before looking at some of advertising's greatest attempts, let's try
to understand just what an advertiser's challenge is.
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Although our society is fortunate to have a proliferation of products and
services, consumers must somehow wade through millions of products
crammed on retail shelves and sort through thousands of marketing
messages that fight for their attention every day. Commercial messages
appear just about everywhere on TV, in magazines, newspapers,
billboards, on the radio, on buses, in phone booths, sports arenas, on the
Internet, even in public toilets. The average American is exposed to over
3,000 ads a day.
Considering this, and today's hi-tech electronic environment, advertisers are
challenged as never before to get their message to consumers. As a result,
advertising job is extremely difficult.
The key to creating advertising that engenders persuasion is to have a
sound and properly focused advertising strategy. It is necessary to
understand who the consumer is and what his/her attitudes and product
usage habits are in order to develop this strategy.
Advertising strategy
An advertising strategy identifies who the prospective target is and defines
his/her needs, wants and desires. This meaningful information, when clearly
and creatively executed, should translate to a call to action: "I'm going to
buy this product." The common form for a written strategy is:
Objective: States what you would like to convince consumers to feel or
do as a result of the advertising execution. This statement should be the
central, singular marketplace problem facing the brand.
Target audience: Who is your prime prospect/customer? (Include age,
gender and any other pertinent demographic/psycho-graphic information
and/or lifestyle explanation of who your target customers are.)
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Key consumer benefit: Must go beyond "Cleans your windows" or
"Tastes great." What (singular) thought/belief about consumers' lives,
brand feelings, category assumptions, hopes, dreams, expectations,
worries, cultural beliefs, etc., will cause a strong reaction and get the
target's attention?
Reason to believe: Which one or two product attributes will persuade
the consumer to believe the product will deliver the promised benefits?
In other words, what is the single most important fact, angle, direction,
sentiment or emotion that can be communicated in order to meet
business objectives/solve the problem?
Proof: Provide support.
Tone and manner: Affects the setting, look and feel of the execution.
Must be relevant to the target audience to drive the message.
Once the strategy is agreed upon, development of the advertising begins.
On-going research is conducted among targeted consumers to evaluate and
check whether the ad is communicating the strategy and whether it evokes
the desired action.
Choose one or two commercials (either from your own reel or those that
follow) and have students participate by trying to figure out what the
objective, reason to believe, etc., is for each spot.
When product sales decline, one of two factors is usually to blame: 1)
consumer dissatisfaction with the product or 2) the advertising has gotten
stale. Through research among the target consumer group, advertisers and
their agencies learn what the problem is and, by talking with the consumers
who use it, determine how they will solve it.
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Changing attitudes through advertising
When changing attitudes through advertising, there are many factors to
consider. One must choose a source who is attractive to the target
audience, a message that will break through the clutter, and a channel that
will maximize comprehension.
Television gives us more information than any other medium. It is where we
go when we want information on breaking news, and it gets more credibility
ratings than newspaper.
A great deal of attitude change research is being done in practical
applications such as the military, advertising, and television networks.
(Cartoon from http://chiron.valdosta.edu/mawhately/767/attitude)
The message and the source
People pay more attention to messages and sources that are unusual,
prestigious, loud, and exotic. They also prefer messages that are
controversial, interesting, and surprising.
Attention- selective exposure
We can not absorb all information, so we select information that will be
useful to us. We seek information that:
Increases our understanding
Does not attack our self-esteem
Helps us adjust in the world
Lets us express our attitudes
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Comprehension
To get maximum comprehension from a message:
Choose a source the audience knows.
This is why celebrity endorsements are so prevalent today. People connect
better with sources they know and trust.
Word the message so it connects with a specific audience.
This is easier than ever with the segmentation of audience due to cable
television. Some companies give a message in several ways to several
audiences.
Pick a channel that allows the message to be fully understood.
Understand the defensiveness of the audience.
Retention
Powerful sources that are ever-present are more likely to increase retention.
We remember sources who are attractive to us. Also, repetition increases
retention. Radio and television can increase repetition more than personal
selling or face to face.
Self Assessment Questions II
1. Powerful sources that are ever-present are more likely to increase
________.
2. _________ is to get maximum comprehension from a message.
3. ________ gives us more information than any other medium.
3.5 Theories of Advertising
Every day, consumers are exposed to no less than 1000 commercial
messages. Of all the different techniques and strategies that try to make an
advertisement most effective, there is an underlying principle persuasion.
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The whole point of any marketing ploy is to get the audiences attention and
then change their mind to believe that their product or service is the best.
There are a variety of different media in which consumers are exposed to
advertisements: television, radio, magazines, newspapers, billboards, and
public transportation. In all types of media, persuasion is used; yet there is
not one theory that can establish a single hypothesis as to the direct route a
message takes to make a favourable judgment. In order to have a holistic
knowledge about the psychology behind persuasion, seven main theories of
persuasion will be examined.
The Cognitive-Response Model explains that the persuasion process takes
place when a person reflects on the content of the message and has
cognitive responses to the message. Cognitive responses are thoughts that
develop while the process of elaborating on the message occurs. Cognitive
responses can be relating the message to other messages previously
exposed to or already existing knowledge of that product or service that is
trying to be sold. This suggests then that persuasion happens when
cognitive responses are favourable to the message.
The proposition of the Dual-Process Model is that there is more than one
means to persuade the mind. Commonly known as the Elaboration
Likelihood Method, this theory states that there are two routes to
persuasion; the central route and the peripheral route. The central route to
persuasion is demonstrated when an active and conscious process is made
to determine the merit of a claim. Either favourable or unfavourable
thoughts towards the argument are made to establish the decision of
whether it has any value. The peripheral route, however, does not analyze
the messages because an audience is exposed to an enormous amount of
messages a day, too many to actively process.
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The Resource-Matching Theory asserts that in order for persuasion to be
successful, the demand for cognitive responses and the supply of cognitive
responses to a message must be comparable. For example, the Tide Rapid
Action Tablets Advertisement provides a phrase to attempt persuasion. If
this slogan, Almost as Easy as Having Your Mom Do It, requires less
thought response than a person is going to provide, message recipients
may generate thoughts that question the claim or produce irrelevant
thoughts that tend to be less favourable. If, on the other hand, an audience
devotes less processing of a message than what the message requires,
they are less likely to make favourable judgements because the claim was
not entirely processed or was processed superficially.
A continuation of the Resource-Matching Theory, The Influence of
Alternative Types of Elaboration on Persuasion hypothesizes that during
message processing, elaboration can consist of two types - item-specific
and relational. Item-specific elaboration centers on the specific product
and/or brand and the unique features that are presented in the message.
Relational elaboration, however, focuses on finding similarities that
categorize or connect individual concepts. It is found that a person will only
make favourable judgements towards the unique features if both types of
elaboration are considered while processing the message.
A quite recent and in need of more refinement theory of persuasion is the
Experiential Bases of Persuasion which states that judgements may be
based on sensations or feelings that are triggered by a message. A
judgement based on sensations and feelings does not need an abundant
level of cognitive resources to be favourable, but is most effective when
processing is limited. In fact, when people engage in careful resource
processing they tend to experience frustration.
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The Accessibility and Diagnostic as Determinants of J udgment theory
suggests what information is likely to make judgments as opposed to how
judgments are made. If a message evokes relative information that is
accessible and comes to mind readily, it will tend to influence judgments of a
claim.
Further investigation of persuasion theories leads to the Context Effects and
Attitude Correction theory that considers whether or not once judgments are
formed they are subject to further consideration or adjustment (Gilbert
1991). Contextual and other irrelevant information can affect judgments,
although, in most cases comply with the original judgment. As Meyers-Levy
and Malaviya found, there are three conditions that must be met in order for
a person to undertake correction of a judgment: first, the person must
realize that irrelevant information may have influenced their initial conclusion
about the persuasive message. Second, the person must identify a nave
theory that might account for why, how, and to what extent the biasing data
could have had this effect. Thirdly, the audience must be willing to generate
further cognitive responses. If these conditions are not met the assimilated
judgements stay intact whereas if the conditions are met, people will try to
discard the influences that biased their opinion/judgement about the
message. This theory is much more applicable to the persuasion process
as it recognizes that even after a judgement has been made favourable or
unfavourable towards a message it is still highly flexible. As in the Tide
advertisement, although an initial reaction to the claim may be to believe it,
future use may prove otherwise, thus altering the judgement on the merit of
the initial message.
Considering that persuasion is used in almost every advertisement is
relevant to discuss the media persuasive messages are delivered. Other
than television and radio, print advertising is most commonly used to
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promote a product or service. It is found by Krugman, Reid, Dunn and
Barban (1994) that of every 5 readers only four get past the headline.
Taking this into account, it is most important for advertising creators to
acknowledge the different theories of persuasion and how one message can
greatly differ in effectiveness from another simply by the persuasive strategy
used.
Self Assessment Questions III
State whether the following statements are True or False:
1. Persuasion is used in almost every advertisement.
2. Investigation of persuasion theories leads to the Context Effects and
Attitude Correction.
3. The Cognitive-Response Model explains that the persuasion process
takes place when a person reflects on the content of the message.
3.6 Summary
Attention is a main focus for any product to be marketed. The focused
approach provides a platform for selling products effectively. The learning,
persuasion and attitude change play a major role in selling products. The
theories of advertising further explain, how to better attract customers mind
for selling products. Television gives us more information than any other
medium. It is where we go when we want information on breaking news, and
it gets more credibility ratings than newspaper. Other than television and
radio, print advertising is most commonly used to promote a product or
service.
3.7 Terminal Questions
1. Define attention.
2. Explain interpretation and processing of information.
3. Explain learning, persuasion and attitude change.
4. Explain the theories of advertising.
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3.8 Answers to SAQs and TQs
SAQs I
1. True 2. True 3. True
SAQs II
1. Retention 2. Comprehension 3. Television
SAQs III
1. True 2. True 3. True
Answers to TQs:
1. Refer to 3.2
2. Refer to 3.3
3. Refer to 3.4
4. Refer to 3.5

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