Complete Summary Lectures & Book Marketing Communications

Marketing Communication
Lecture 1
Attention is levels of processing/involvement
- Limited
- Selective
- Voluntary or involuntary
- A precondition for further processing
More attention = more cognitive capacity = more comprehension = more elaboration
Levels of processing/involvement:
- Pre-attention: little or no capacity required (automatic processing)
- Focal attention: little capacity required
- Comprehension: modest levels of capacity required
- Elaboration: substantial levels of capacity required




Increasing involuntary attention:
Often unconscious and unintended -> ‘attractors’ -> associated with bottom-up
processing (start in your elaboration/persuasion in marketing where consumers start
from pre-attention)
Various communication cues can increase an automatic orienting response:
- Saliency (original and novel stimuli):
o Perceptually prominent (size, color, contrast, …)
o Novel, unexpected and original stimuli
o Stimuli related to life and death
o Stick out and are hard to ignore
o Lead to mild psychological arousal

, o Result in focal attention to the source of stimulation
- Horizontal centrality (centrally located stimuli):
o Stimuli in the center receive more attention (and are more likely to be
chosen)
- Primacy (stimuli presented first in a list)
o In the beginning you’re more fresh and pay more attention
o We have learned that the most important things come first
- Picture superiority (pictures)
o Pictorial information receives more information than textual information
o Pictures attract attention, regardless of size
o The bigger the text, the more attention
o The bigger the brand name, the more attention

Increasing voluntary attention
(Personal interest and inattentional blindness, self-referencing, proximity)
How to increase?
- Increase self-relevance -> personal interest avoids inattentional blindness,
self-referencing, proximity…
- Curiosity -> unfinished ads, mysterious ads…
Often conscious and intended -> ‘magnetizers’ -> associated with top-down
processing
- Personal interest & inattentional blindness
o Consumers allocate more attention to information that is consistent with
their goals
o Information that is not relevant, is often ignored, and will lead to
inattentional blindness
o Banner blindness
 Organic results generate more attention and traffic because they
are immediately relevant
 Sponsored result often suffer from inattentional blindness
- Self referencing
o Attention increases when personalized information is used
 Second person wording (‘you)
 Names
- Proximity & EWOM
o Consumers pay more attention to information that is ‘close’ (in the
senses -> interest and social acquaintances )
 If information comes from someone who is closer to you, you pay
more attention
o The more proximate, the more relevant, the more attention
 Sensory proximity: closeness in experience

,  Spatial proximity: closeness in physical space
 Temporal proximity: closeness in time (if your planning to do
something soon, you pay more attention to related things)
A variety of applications:
- E(WOM) comes from people close to use (spatial and sensory proximity)
- Viral marketing is emotionally vivid (sensory proximity) and is shared via
friends
- Blogs are written by influencers that feel close (sensory proximity)
- Billboards and abri’s are prominent and often close in space
How campaigns sustain attention:
Processing ease
- Increases engagement -> the easier, the more likely that people will continue
with the task
- Generates positive affect -> fluency generally leads to positive feelings
- Increases comprehension -> the easier, the less resources are needed for
comprehension and elaboration
o Linking your appeal to what consumers already know makes it easier
for them to comprehend
o Increased by:
 Concrete information is easier to process, and helps to link to
existing knowledge structures -> processing ease, concrete
information, memory traces and the associative network theory
 Visual information strengthens memory traces (dual coding
theory)
 Visual and verbal modalities lead to different encoding
strategies -> words are stored in verbal codes, images are
stored in visual codes, the net result is more and distinct
memory traces
 Variability not only prevents boredom, but also strengthens
existing knowledge structures (encoding variability)
 The more memory traces available, the easier to encode,
comprehend and retrieve -> novel (but related)
information receives an extra memory trace
Emotional language
- Not all emotions are able to sustain attention well
- Emotions that do sustain attention are associated with uncertainty (because
people will try to resolve what will happen) and arousal (because people are in
an increased state of vigilance)

, Lecture 2
Persuasion= any attempt to influence a person’s beliefs, attitudes, intentions, or
behavior
Pre-suasion = the process of making ‘recipients’ ready for a request
Attitudes = a learned predisposition to behave in a consistently favorable or
unfavorable manner with respect to a given object -> aka out likes or dislikes




- Affective: excitement of rollercoaster -> what you feel when thinking about the
efteling
- Cognitive: costs, having restaurants
- Behavioral: past experience, hearing stories
Attitude functions: our ‘likes’ and ‘dislikes’
- Provide information about the relevance of items to one’s goals (functional
theory) -> why do people like it?
o Ego defensive
- Provide a fast and automatic assessment of whether something is good or bad
(automatic evaluation)
Advertising repetition
Two-factor theory:
- Ad wear-in:
o Occurs at the first couple of exposures
o Initial attitudes are often negative because:
 The message is not appreciated
 People are quite defensive
o After a number of exposures attitudes become more favorable because:
 People start to understand the message
 Initial defensiveness dissipates
- Ad wear-out
o Occurs after a number of exposures
o Positive attitudes become more negative