ADVERTISING PSYCHOLOGY

Dr. Julia Pitters

Lecture 1 Universität Salzburg
 Introduction

• What do you connect with advertising?

• Can you imagine a world without advertising?

 Definitions

• Advertising is defined as any form of paid communication by an

identified sponsor aimed to inform and/or persuade target audiences
about an organization, product, service or idea.

• Market psychology deals with human behavior in markets.

• Explains and makes forecast about market behavior in terms of
supply and demand.
• The study of individuals, groups, or organizations and the processes
they use to select, secure, use, and dispose of products, services,
experiences, or ideas to satisfy needs and the impacts that these
processes have on the consumer and society.
 Origins of modern day advertising
• First type of outdoor advertising, archeological tradesmen's and
tavern signs from ancient civilizations as Egypt, Greece and Rome.
• E.g. Ancient Roman baking mold imprinted with the name of the
baker and some gladiators, served to spectators as snack during
gladiatorial games, and the inscription reads: “Miscenius Ampilatus
makes [this] in Salonae.”
 Origins of modern day advertising

• Industrial revolution between 1730 and 1830 boosted advertising

practice.
• Growing importance of consumer brand: The label with which to
designate an individual product and differentiate it from competitors.
• Unique selling proposition (USP) summary statement used to
differentiate the brand from the competition.
• American Civil War/ World War I temporarily slowed down
production.
• After Depression and World War II, advertising volumes increased
tremendously.
• Post war economic boom enabled ever more consumers by new
technologies, TV, today internet.
Advertising reflecting Zeitgeist
 Functions of advertising

• Commercial sponsorship
• Facilitates competition among firms
• Funding mass media
• Serving as key employer to thousands of professionals worldwide
• Informing and persuading
Advertising in Austria

Werbeplanung.at, 2009;
http://www.werbeplanung.at/download/prognose_spendings_2010.pdf
 Approaches to Advertising

• Naive approach, assumes, advertising must be effective because it

is omnipresent, expenditures are large and ever increasing.
• Economic approach, tries to address efficiency by correlating
expenditures with aggregated changes in sales volume.
• Media approach, effectiveness is defined as number of persons in
target population who have been exposed to message.
• Creative approach, equates effectiveness with creativity,
widespread among advertising agencies.

• Psychological approach, aims at identifying effects of advertising

at the individual level. Investigates intrapersonal, interpersonal or
group-level psychological processes responsible for relationship
between ad stimuli and consumer responses.
 Psychological approach

• Psychological approach goes back to Walter Scott, publishing a

paper about The Psychology of Advertising in 1904.
• Focus on types of consumer responses, types of advertising
stimuli affecting these responses, and the types of postulated,
causal relations between advertising stimuli and consumer
responses.
• Cognitive consumer responses are beliefs and thoughts about
brands, also attitudes and preferences.
• Affective consumer responses entail various more or less transient
emotions and moods towards an ad, e.g. warmth, fear, pride, anger.
• Behavioral responses include the intention and actual behavior in
response to advertising.
Assessing ad effects on consumer responses

• Relationships between consumer thoughts, feelings and behavior

affected by advertising can be correlational or causal.
• Although correlation is a necessary condition for causality it is not
sufficient, to infer that A causes B, three conditions must be met.
• 1. the antecedent A must precede the consequence B, 2. changes in
the antecedent must be associated with changes in the
consequence, and 3. no other explanation for the change in the
consequence (3rd variable problem).
• Common research design is experiment, antecedent is independent
variable and consequence is dependent variable.
 Source and message variables in advertising

• Source credibility, includes source expertise and trustworthiness

• Source attractiveness, e.g. by appealing to sexual attraction and
physical beauty
• Argument quality and message structure, e.g. taking benefit from
primacy/recency effect
• Message sideness, in two-sided advertisements supporting and
counterarguments are included.
• Argument-based and affect based appeals, for experiential products
(wine, perfumes, paintings) affect based appeals are more effective,
For functional products ( computer, washing machine, toothpaste)
argument based appeals are more appropriate.
• Fear-arousing communication, scare consumer into action (physical,
social, financial)
 Direct marketing

• Direct marketing, direct and individual communication with

potential costumer, one of the fastest growing sectors of the US
economy (Belch & Belch, 2004), includes database management,
direct response advertising or e.g. Tupperware home parties.
 Direct marketing

• Word-of-mouth marketing, influence agent is not a sales

representative but a committed user of the product.
• Event marketing, e.g. sports event is used to get in touch with
prospective costumers.
• Sponsorship, of an existing or new event, closely associated with
the sponsoring brand e.g. AOL Arena.
• Direct mail, personalized form of advertizing, addressing costumers
by their names and needs.
 Interactive marketing

• Shares the feedback between sender and receiver with direct

marketing, involves using the potential of the internet, allows the
costumer to become "co-producer“ e.g. Nike.
 Sales promotion

• Is focused on generating an immediate behavioral response from

the costumer = action communication.
• Five basic functions, increase market size, reward loyal
costumers, make existing costumers more loyal, stimulate trial by
new consumers, support other communication tools (De Pelsmacker
et al. 2001).
 Public Relations (PR)

• Instrument to promote favorable perceptions about the organization

as a whole.
• Broad “theater“ includes sponsoring of public events, communication
with media, gatekeepers, political stakeholders, pressure groups,
government bodies and internal employees.
• Financial PR, aims at informing and persuading financial
audiences, essential for the long term money-raising potential of the
costumer (e.g. banks, potential investors, shareholders)
• Marketing PR, entails promotion of new products and services
through free publicity.
 Personal selling

• By definition a two way face-to-face communication

• Aims at informing and at persuading a potential buyer of an initial
purchase of a product or fostering repeated purchases and creating
costumer loyalty.
• Social psychological topics, such as attitude change, influence
techniques come into play (e.g. Cialdini, 2009)
Advantages
Higher overall impact than many other tools
• Possibility of demonstrating the product and negotiating the price
• No waste, target person is reached
Disadvantages
• Expensive form of communication
• Limited reach and frequency
• Company cannot control the content of its messages
 Concave sales response model

• Incremental impact of advertising diminishes with increasing

communication budget.
• Once entire population of non-buyers has been reached, additional
efforts will not add much impact.
 S-shaped sales response model

• Initial impact of advertising is low

• After “wear-in“ phase exponential increase up to saturation point
 Hierarchy-of-effects models
• No direct link between ad message and consumer response
• Instead, several intermediate steps
• Assumption that consumer learning takes place
• Three stages,
• Cognitive stage, consumers engage in directing conscious attention
to the target ad and thinking about its content.
• Affective stage, emotional responses and formation of attitudes and
preferences associated with the brand.
• Conative stage, behavior that might arise from advertising.
 AIDA model (Elmo Lewis, 1898)
ATTENTION
Attention of the costumer is activated (cognitive stage)
INTEREST
Interest in the product
DESIRE
Desire to posses the product (affective stage)
ACTION
Purchase of the product (conative stage)
Foote, Cone-Belding grid (Vaughn, 1980)
DAGMAR (Dutka, 1995)

• Defining Advertising Goals for Measured

Advertising Results
• Highlights a basic distinction in evaluative
versus non-evaluative consumer
responses to advertising
• Compatible with two essential functions,
such as informing and persuading.
 Problems of hierarchy-of-effects models

• No convincing evidence that advertising affects consumer in the

sequence suggested by the models.
• Only concerned with the effects of advertising as discrete media
messages (in reality various other marketing factors come into play)
• Represent a simplistic view of human behavior and response
processes without any regard at underlying processes and
moderating conditions.
• Models are inflexible assuming that all ads have the same specific
effects.
 Cognitive response approach

• Cognitive response model spearheaded new attention to information

processing issues.
• Shares with hierarchy-of-effects model that learning takes place.
• However emphasized mediating role of cognitive responses when
being exposed to persuasive message.
• No longer passive recipient of ad, but tries actively to make sense of
it.
• Cognitive responding may lead to persuasion, active resistance or a
neutral position.
• Major shortcoming, does not account for the processes that occur
when ability or motivation is low.
 Dual process approaches

• Information processing, judgment and decision-making must be

viewed as a continuum.
• At the one end, information processing is characterized by
controlled, explicit, conscious, deliberate, analytical, effortful,
reflective, rule-based, bottom-up processing and judgment.
• Other and, information processing involves automatic, fast, implicit,
impulsive, immediate, experiential, non-conscious, effortless,
associative, top down processing and judgment. In this mode, prior
knowledge, simple decision rules (heuristics), stereotypes are
referred to.
 Literature

Books
• Aronson, E., Wilson, T. & Akert, R. (2010). Social Psychology, 7th
edition. New York: Pearson.
• Cialdini, R. (2006). The psychology of persuasion. Harper
Paperbacks.
• Fennis, M. & Stroebe, W. (2010). The Psychology of Advertising.
New York: Psychology Press.
• Kirchler, E. (2011). Wirtschaftspsychologie. Göttingen: Hogrefe.
 Literature

• Allison, R.I & Uhl, K. P. (1964). Influence of beer brand identification

on taste perception. Journal of Marketing Research,1 , 36-39.
• Becker, J. (1998). Marketing-Konzeption, Grundlagen des
Strategischen und Operativen Marketing-Managements, 6. Aufl.,
München:
• Cline, T.W., Kellaris, J.J. & Machleit, K.A. (2011). Consumer's needs
for levity in advertising communications. Journal of Marketing
Communications, 17 (1), 17-35.
• Felser, G. (2007). Werbe- und Konsumentenpsychologie.
Heidelberg: Springer.
 Literature

• Foxall, G.R., Goldsmith, R.E. & Brown, S. (1998). Consumer

Psychology for Marketing. London: Thomson.
• Haugtvedt, C.P. & Wegener, D.T. (1994). Message order effects in
persuasion: An attitude strength perspective. Journal of Consumer
Research, 21, 205-218.
• Kotler, P. & Armstrong, G. (1996). Principles of Marketing (7.
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• Mattenklott, A. (2007). Emotionale Werbung. In K. Moser (Hrsg.)
Wirtschaftspsychologie (S. 86-106). Heidelberg: Springer.
• McDonald, C. & Scott, J. (2007). A brief history of advertising. In
G.J. Tellis & T. Ambler (Eds.), The Sage Handbook of Advertising
(pp. 17-35). Thousand Oaks, CA:Sage.
 Literature

• Moser, K. (2007). Werbewirkungsmodelle. In K. Moser (Hrsg.)

Wirtschaftspsychologie (S. 12-29). Heidelberg: Springer Medizin
Verlag.
• Solomon, M., Marshall, G. W. & Stuart, E. W. (2006). Advertising
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River: Pearson.
• Verwijmeren, T., Karremans, J.C., Stroebe, W. & Wigboldus, D.H.J.
(2011). The workings and limits of subliminal advertising: The role of
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• White, P. & Harkins, S.G. (1994). Race of source effects in the
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