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. Advertising Management and Sales Promotion Unit 3 Sikkim Manipal University Page No. 38 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 Advertising Management and Sales Promotion Unit 3 Sikkim Manipal University Page No. 39 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, Advertising Management and Sales Promotion Unit 3 Sikkim Manipal University Page No. 40 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 Advertising Management and Sales Promotion Unit 3 Sikkim Manipal University Page No. 41 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. Advertising Management and Sales Promotion Unit 3 Sikkim Manipal University Page No. 42 "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. Advertising Management and Sales Promotion Unit 3 Sikkim Manipal University Page No. 43 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 Advertising Management and Sales Promotion Unit 3 Sikkim Manipal University Page No. 44 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 Advertising Management and Sales Promotion Unit 3 Sikkim Manipal University Page No. 45 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. Advertising Management and Sales Promotion Unit 3 Sikkim Manipal University Page No. 46 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 Advertising Management and Sales Promotion Unit 3 Sikkim Manipal University Page No. 47 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 Advertising Management and Sales Promotion Unit 3 Sikkim Manipal University Page No. 48 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 Advertising Management and Sales Promotion Unit 3 Sikkim Manipal University Page No. 49 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 Advertising Management and Sales Promotion Unit 3 Sikkim Manipal University Page No. 50 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 Advertising Management and Sales Promotion Unit 3 Sikkim Manipal University Page No. 51 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. Advertising Management and Sales Promotion Unit 3 Sikkim Manipal University Page No. 52 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 Advertising Management and Sales Promotion Unit 3 Sikkim Manipal University Page No. 53 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 Advertising Management and Sales Promotion Unit 3 Sikkim Manipal University Page No. 54 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. Advertising Management and Sales Promotion Unit 3 Sikkim Manipal University Page No. 55 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. Advertising Management and Sales Promotion Unit 3 Sikkim Manipal University Page No. 56 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. Advertising Management and Sales Promotion Unit 3 Sikkim Manipal University Page No. 57 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. Advertising Management and Sales Promotion Unit 3 Sikkim Manipal University Page No. 58 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.) Advertising Management and Sales Promotion Unit 3 Sikkim Manipal University Page No. 59 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. Advertising Management and Sales Promotion Unit 3 Sikkim Manipal University Page No. 60 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 Advertising Management and Sales Promotion Unit 3 Sikkim Manipal University Page No. 61 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. Advertising Management and Sales Promotion Unit 3 Sikkim Manipal University Page No. 62 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. Advertising Management and Sales Promotion Unit 3 Sikkim Manipal University Page No. 63 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. Advertising Management and Sales Promotion Unit 3 Sikkim Manipal University Page No. 64 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 Advertising Management and Sales Promotion Unit 3 Sikkim Manipal University Page No. 65 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. Advertising Management and Sales Promotion Unit 3 Sikkim Manipal University Page No. 66 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