The Psychology of Advertising
Chapter 1: Setting the stage...................................................................................................................4
The origins of modern-day advertising...............................................................................................4
The functions of advertising...............................................................................................................4
The effects of advertising: a psychological perspective......................................................................5
Consumer responses..........................................................................................................................5
Assessing advertising effects on consumer responses....................................................................6
Source and message variables in advertising......................................................................................6
Advertising in context: integrated marketing communications and the promotional mix.................8
Classic and contemporary approaches of conceptualizing advertising effectiveness.........................9
Sales-response models...................................................................................................................9
Early models of individual responses to advertising: hierarchy-of-effects models.......................10
Information processing research in advertising............................................................................11
Cognitive response approach.......................................................................................................11
Dual process approaches..............................................................................................................11
Unconscious processes in consumer behaviour...........................................................................12
Chapter 2: How consumers acquire and process information from advertising...................................13
Preattentive analysis.........................................................................................................................13
Feature analysis and semantic analysis........................................................................................13
Matching activation......................................................................................................................14
Preattentive processing and hedonic fluency...............................................................................15
Focal attention..................................................................................................................................16
......................................................................................................................................................16
Salience.........................................................................................................................................16
Vividness.......................................................................................................................................16
Novelty.........................................................................................................................................17
Categorization..............................................................................................................................17
Typicality and the pioneering advantage......................................................................................18
Assimilation and contrast.............................................................................................................18
Impression formation and impression correction.........................................................................19
Comprehension................................................................................................................................19
Seeing is believing.........................................................................................................................19
Miscomprehension and misleading advertising claims.................................................................20
Elaborative reasoning.......................................................................................................................20
, Self-schema and elaborative reasoning........................................................................................20
Consumer meta-cognition............................................................................................................20
Chapter 3: How advertising affects consumer memory........................................................................21
The structure and function of human memory................................................................................22
Levels of processing......................................................................................................................23
The model of working memory of Baddele and Hitch..................................................................23
Forms of long-term memory.........................................................................................................23
Knowledge structures in long-term memory................................................................................25
Implications for advertising..............................................................................................................26
The role of memory in judgements: on the ineffectiveness of traditional measures of advertising
effectiveness.................................................................................................................................26
Memory factors in brand choice: the role of cognitive accessibility.............................................27
Forgetting the message: advertising clutter and competitive interference..................................28
Can advertising distort memory?.....................................................................................................30
Chapter 4: How consumers from attitudes towards products..............................................................32
What is an attitude? A matter of contention....................................................................................32
Defining the concept....................................................................................................................32
Implicit and explicit attitudes: challenging the unity of the attitude concept?.............................32
Are attitudes stable or context dependent?.................................................................................34
Implications for the definition of the attitude concept.................................................................34
Attitude strength..............................................................................................................................34
Accessibility..................................................................................................................................35
Attitude importance.....................................................................................................................35
Attitude knowledge......................................................................................................................35
Attitude certainty..........................................................................................................................36
Attitudinal ambivalence................................................................................................................36
Attitude strength and the context dependence of attitudinal judgements..................................36
Attitude formation............................................................................................................................37
The formation of cognitively based evaluative responses............................................................37
The formation of evaluative responses based on affective or emotional experience...................38
The formation of evaluations based on behavioural information................................................39
Attitude structure.............................................................................................................................40
Expectancy-value models.............................................................................................................40
Attitudes towards the advertisement and the dual mediation hypothesis...................................40
The functions of attitudes and attitude objects................................................................................40
Attitude functions: why people hold attitudes.............................................................................41
2
, Why people acquire goods...........................................................................................................41
Chapter 5: How consumers yield to advertising – Principles of persuasion and attitude change.........42
The yale reinforcement approach....................................................................................................42
The information processing model of McGuire................................................................................43
The cognitive response model..........................................................................................................44
Dual process theories persuasion.....................................................................................................45
Biased processing of information.................................................................................................46
Assessing the intensity of processing...............................................................................................46
Processing ability, processing intensity and attitude change........................................................46
Processing ability and attitude change.........................................................................................46
Processing motivation, processing intensity and attitude change................................................47
Strategies to lower resistance to advertising....................................................................................49
Two-sided advertisements............................................................................................................49
Product placement.......................................................................................................................50
Sponsorship..................................................................................................................................50
Chapter 6: How advertising influences buying behaviour....................................................................51
The attitude-behaviour relationship: a brief history.........................................................................51
Predicting specific behaviour: the reasoned action approach..........................................................52
The standard model......................................................................................................................53
Narrowing the intention-behaviour gap: forming implementation intentions.................................53
Implications for advertising..............................................................................................................54
Beyond reasons and plans: the automatic instigation of behaviour.................................................54
Automatic and deliberate influence of attitudes..........................................................................55
Automatic and deliberate influence of social norms....................................................................55
Automatic and deliberate influence of goals................................................................................56
Goals, habits and behaviour.........................................................................................................57
Implications of advertising: the return of hidden persuaders..........................................................58
3
, The psychology of advertising
Chapter 1: Setting the stage
Advertising= any form of paid communication by an identified sponsor aimed to inform and/or
persuade target audiences about an organization, product, service, or idea.
Criticism: online / social media advertising - it may or may not be paid (YouTube videos heralding
or cursing the brand), and it may or may not involve an identified sponsor (e.g., think of the
numerous, yet anonymous “likes” of a product)
The origins of modern-day advertising
Ancient civilizations (Egypt and Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome): traders and merchants were keen
to tell their community what they had to sell and at what price. Also, ads for slaves and household
products. Later, town criers and travelling merchants advertised goods and services. The
Industrial Revolution boosted advertising practice (large-scale diffusion of labour, scale of
production). Creation and growing importance of the consumer brand: the label with which to
designate an individual product and differentiate it from competitors. The unique selling proposition
(USP) was born: a summary statement used to meaningfully differentiate the brand from the
competition. After World War II advertising volumes skyrocket again
Evolution of advertising media:
Clay tablets, placards, handbills, poster bills, billboards newspapers and magazines
television, radio, and internet
Newspapers continue to be popular – reach certain customer segments that share common
interests, values, or lifestyles
The internet appears complementary rather than a substitute medium, although it has taken
away of the market share from other media
Informational or argument-based appeal= straightforwardly inform consumers what was for sale, at
what price and where one could buy it (hard-sell approach / reason-why approach).
Emotional or affect-based appeal= influence the consumer’s feelings and emotions rather than his
thoughts (soft-sell approach / a more subtle approach)
The functions of advertising
In contemporary industrialized societies, advertising serves several functions: facilitating
competition, communicating with consumers about products and services, funding public mass
media and other public resources (search engines would not exist if it were not for advertising
expenditures), creating jobs and informing and persuading the individual consumer.
Two essential functions of advertising at the individual level Inform (creating or influencing
knowledge or beliefs) and persuade (generating or changing an evaluative response) the individual
consumer.
Informational appeals are used more frequently for durable goods (e.g., products that can be used
repeatedly such as refrigerators, cars, or furniture) than non-durable goods (e.g., food items,
cosmetics, or holidays). And more in developed countries than developing countries.
4
Chapter 1: Setting the stage...................................................................................................................4
The origins of modern-day advertising...............................................................................................4
The functions of advertising...............................................................................................................4
The effects of advertising: a psychological perspective......................................................................5
Consumer responses..........................................................................................................................5
Assessing advertising effects on consumer responses....................................................................6
Source and message variables in advertising......................................................................................6
Advertising in context: integrated marketing communications and the promotional mix.................8
Classic and contemporary approaches of conceptualizing advertising effectiveness.........................9
Sales-response models...................................................................................................................9
Early models of individual responses to advertising: hierarchy-of-effects models.......................10
Information processing research in advertising............................................................................11
Cognitive response approach.......................................................................................................11
Dual process approaches..............................................................................................................11
Unconscious processes in consumer behaviour...........................................................................12
Chapter 2: How consumers acquire and process information from advertising...................................13
Preattentive analysis.........................................................................................................................13
Feature analysis and semantic analysis........................................................................................13
Matching activation......................................................................................................................14
Preattentive processing and hedonic fluency...............................................................................15
Focal attention..................................................................................................................................16
......................................................................................................................................................16
Salience.........................................................................................................................................16
Vividness.......................................................................................................................................16
Novelty.........................................................................................................................................17
Categorization..............................................................................................................................17
Typicality and the pioneering advantage......................................................................................18
Assimilation and contrast.............................................................................................................18
Impression formation and impression correction.........................................................................19
Comprehension................................................................................................................................19
Seeing is believing.........................................................................................................................19
Miscomprehension and misleading advertising claims.................................................................20
Elaborative reasoning.......................................................................................................................20
, Self-schema and elaborative reasoning........................................................................................20
Consumer meta-cognition............................................................................................................20
Chapter 3: How advertising affects consumer memory........................................................................21
The structure and function of human memory................................................................................22
Levels of processing......................................................................................................................23
The model of working memory of Baddele and Hitch..................................................................23
Forms of long-term memory.........................................................................................................23
Knowledge structures in long-term memory................................................................................25
Implications for advertising..............................................................................................................26
The role of memory in judgements: on the ineffectiveness of traditional measures of advertising
effectiveness.................................................................................................................................26
Memory factors in brand choice: the role of cognitive accessibility.............................................27
Forgetting the message: advertising clutter and competitive interference..................................28
Can advertising distort memory?.....................................................................................................30
Chapter 4: How consumers from attitudes towards products..............................................................32
What is an attitude? A matter of contention....................................................................................32
Defining the concept....................................................................................................................32
Implicit and explicit attitudes: challenging the unity of the attitude concept?.............................32
Are attitudes stable or context dependent?.................................................................................34
Implications for the definition of the attitude concept.................................................................34
Attitude strength..............................................................................................................................34
Accessibility..................................................................................................................................35
Attitude importance.....................................................................................................................35
Attitude knowledge......................................................................................................................35
Attitude certainty..........................................................................................................................36
Attitudinal ambivalence................................................................................................................36
Attitude strength and the context dependence of attitudinal judgements..................................36
Attitude formation............................................................................................................................37
The formation of cognitively based evaluative responses............................................................37
The formation of evaluative responses based on affective or emotional experience...................38
The formation of evaluations based on behavioural information................................................39
Attitude structure.............................................................................................................................40
Expectancy-value models.............................................................................................................40
Attitudes towards the advertisement and the dual mediation hypothesis...................................40
The functions of attitudes and attitude objects................................................................................40
Attitude functions: why people hold attitudes.............................................................................41
2
, Why people acquire goods...........................................................................................................41
Chapter 5: How consumers yield to advertising – Principles of persuasion and attitude change.........42
The yale reinforcement approach....................................................................................................42
The information processing model of McGuire................................................................................43
The cognitive response model..........................................................................................................44
Dual process theories persuasion.....................................................................................................45
Biased processing of information.................................................................................................46
Assessing the intensity of processing...............................................................................................46
Processing ability, processing intensity and attitude change........................................................46
Processing ability and attitude change.........................................................................................46
Processing motivation, processing intensity and attitude change................................................47
Strategies to lower resistance to advertising....................................................................................49
Two-sided advertisements............................................................................................................49
Product placement.......................................................................................................................50
Sponsorship..................................................................................................................................50
Chapter 6: How advertising influences buying behaviour....................................................................51
The attitude-behaviour relationship: a brief history.........................................................................51
Predicting specific behaviour: the reasoned action approach..........................................................52
The standard model......................................................................................................................53
Narrowing the intention-behaviour gap: forming implementation intentions.................................53
Implications for advertising..............................................................................................................54
Beyond reasons and plans: the automatic instigation of behaviour.................................................54
Automatic and deliberate influence of attitudes..........................................................................55
Automatic and deliberate influence of social norms....................................................................55
Automatic and deliberate influence of goals................................................................................56
Goals, habits and behaviour.........................................................................................................57
Implications of advertising: the return of hidden persuaders..........................................................58
3
, The psychology of advertising
Chapter 1: Setting the stage
Advertising= any form of paid communication by an identified sponsor aimed to inform and/or
persuade target audiences about an organization, product, service, or idea.
Criticism: online / social media advertising - it may or may not be paid (YouTube videos heralding
or cursing the brand), and it may or may not involve an identified sponsor (e.g., think of the
numerous, yet anonymous “likes” of a product)
The origins of modern-day advertising
Ancient civilizations (Egypt and Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome): traders and merchants were keen
to tell their community what they had to sell and at what price. Also, ads for slaves and household
products. Later, town criers and travelling merchants advertised goods and services. The
Industrial Revolution boosted advertising practice (large-scale diffusion of labour, scale of
production). Creation and growing importance of the consumer brand: the label with which to
designate an individual product and differentiate it from competitors. The unique selling proposition
(USP) was born: a summary statement used to meaningfully differentiate the brand from the
competition. After World War II advertising volumes skyrocket again
Evolution of advertising media:
Clay tablets, placards, handbills, poster bills, billboards newspapers and magazines
television, radio, and internet
Newspapers continue to be popular – reach certain customer segments that share common
interests, values, or lifestyles
The internet appears complementary rather than a substitute medium, although it has taken
away of the market share from other media
Informational or argument-based appeal= straightforwardly inform consumers what was for sale, at
what price and where one could buy it (hard-sell approach / reason-why approach).
Emotional or affect-based appeal= influence the consumer’s feelings and emotions rather than his
thoughts (soft-sell approach / a more subtle approach)
The functions of advertising
In contemporary industrialized societies, advertising serves several functions: facilitating
competition, communicating with consumers about products and services, funding public mass
media and other public resources (search engines would not exist if it were not for advertising
expenditures), creating jobs and informing and persuading the individual consumer.
Two essential functions of advertising at the individual level Inform (creating or influencing
knowledge or beliefs) and persuade (generating or changing an evaluative response) the individual
consumer.
Informational appeals are used more frequently for durable goods (e.g., products that can be used
repeatedly such as refrigerators, cars, or furniture) than non-durable goods (e.g., food items,
cosmetics, or holidays). And more in developed countries than developing countries.
4
