Global Advertising, Attitudes, and Audiences

Tony Wilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136933622
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Advertising
• Index: Business

Global Advertising, Attitudes and Audiences is a post-Mcdonaldization view of marketing power, consumer pleasure, and audience protest. The psychological process wherein consumers actively make sense of advertising and branding and integrate them with living is fundamentally important in thinking about their responses to product sold on screen. This wide-ranging book draws on forty years of media and marketing theory to present a precise perception of that process, a seven stage model of 'moments' in media marketing reception.

Local understandings of global branding and marketing content traveling—often from West to East—is the main focus of Global Advertising, Attitudes and Audiences. Drawing from diverse reception studies of creative consumption, Tony Wilson develops a philosophical psychology of purchasing, testing theory against shared consumer responses in online blogospheres and offline interviews. Successive chapters interpret reception of banking, fast food, national, telecommunications and university global branding by Chinese, Indian and Islamic Malay consumers in multi-cultural Malaysia, an Anglophone gateway to S.E. Asia. These studies are used to illustrate how people view the 'worlds' constructed by product branding.

1 Audiences Articulating Advertising

“Modern marketing” could be “modern culture par excellence. Its success in becoming—for all institutions—the principal mode of relating with their constituents is a testimony to the centrality of marketing in contemporary culture.”

(Firat and Dholakia, 2006: 124)

If marketing is now culturally central how is it mediated through television and Internet screens which are equally perceptually pivotal in modern times? How does it address consumers leading them to buy brands? What is the communicative logic of this situation? How can we understand the process of media persuading us to purchase product? Why do audiences align with or become alienated from advertising on screen? Continuing this spatial metaphor, how does global branding become culturally close to local consumers? For they clearly have differing perspectives on the world (or occupy distant horizons of understanding its content). In seeking to respond to these geographically oriented questions we remember Fischer and Sherry's remark (2007) while presenting Consumer Culture Theory that the “geography of contemporary consumption, as it must, will be re-written and re-mapped continuously” (3).

As a book on media branding, this volume is about understanding the reasons why everyday audiences form attitudes rather than explaining the causes of those value judgments. Relationships between evaluative belief and eventual buying abstracted by theory elsewhere are placed back within cultural horizons (or an informing context) where people link product and person in a process of articulating identities for both screen and self. Recognizing and interpreting such phenomena needs to conceptually precede inductive (generalizing) statistical description. We shall attend to the time-taking process wherein both consumer and market researcher understand “data.”

Consumers articulate (sometimes persuasive) narrative about media branded products, appropriating these branding stories to shape their horizons of self understanding for a reason. They are not caused to do so as an effect of screen content. Rather, drawing on their always already existing awareness of narrative and other cultural forms to assemble the meaning of a sometimes enigmatic branding story, they identify (or align) with people's product use therein. Consumers thereby generate narratives of (would-be) guidance from generic information and find them appropriate. Or they distance (alienate) themselves from narrative content (and form) in distrust.

Global Advertising considers Asian consumer responses to global and local screen marketing and shopping malls which are argued to be analogous in their modes of immersing audiences. How shoppers understand and incorporate both mall and media marketing into their daily lives is immensely culturally varied but essentially identical. We focus on their interpreting and identifying (with) marketing brands on screen from banks and fast food to universities, nations to telecommunications. Our research participant discourse (or speech) displaying the prolonged cognitive process wherein consumers make sense of advertising and branding and integrate them with living is emphasized as fundamentally important in our analyzing marketing.

Often, the story of selling through screens is couched in terms of influencing consumer attitudes towards a brand or product. Like some communication studies (e.g. in cultivation theory), marketing research can consider this to be a causal chain, a narrative in which powerful advertising will have the effect of bringing about buying behavior. The success (or strength) of this connection, it is said, can be quantitatively measured. In this chapter we shall discuss some initial instances of consumer discourse (or talk) to conclude that such a linking of events between screen and purchase is a myth with caused or causal attitudes a core fiction at the heart of this methodological delusion.

Replacing such a narrative of passive purchasing, we shall argue instead, consumers actively appropriate media advertising. They both identify the meaning of content (i.e. recognize it) and identify (i.e. align) with characters on screen, with the latter's activity providing reasons for purchase. As a contributor to my early consumer research asserted, “they are doing that, why not us?” Or, resisting the rational momentum of advertising's sought for agreement, consumers are critical, becoming alienated (Brecht, 1978) or discovering their distance from marketing on screen.¹

So how do audiences form attitudes? Can they be said to do so actively and rationally? Or are attitudes the passive caused consequences of much media watching? Do we cultivate screen content as meaningful narrative or do the media cultivate our perceptions as audiences? More specifically, in consumer responses to advertising are attitudes towards products produced by screen branding? Or are they arrived at through audiences articulating the meaning of media marketing? Do consumers construct their conceptions of products or are both built for them? And when we have answered these questions about the structure of consuming, how do we statistically evaluate our data? For the abstractions of hermeneutics precede but do not displace quantitative assessment.

In Global Advertising, we refer to researchers for whom audiences or consumers are passive recipients of perceptual content (of what used to be called “sense data”)as Inductive Causalists. Constructing what could be called an “inductive statistical apparatus” (ISA) of measurement, these investigators focus on generalizing or generating statistical accounts of data (such as events on screen and audience behavior). Highly correlated “data” are elevated to the status of being linked as cause and effect by a connecting “mechanism” about which speculation can take place. Inductivists of this persuasion are thus to be considered would-be Causalists seeking a more or less complex chain of cause and effect occurrence between “variables” like “media-use” and “audience attitudes”:

media-use variables, then, are endogenous—that is, subject to the influence of causally prior variables. Conversely (…) there is ample evidence for effects of media-use variables on beliefs, attitudes, and behavior—the components of personal and social identity.

(Slater, 2007: 282).

The underlying issue here is: are the data discovered to be primarily conceptualized or described in terms belonging to the world view of researcher or researched? For studies pursued quantitatively nonetheless rest on a qualitative base as calculations concerning the world.

Interpretivists (as I shall call them) assume that audience consumers (actively) construct (narrative) sense for that which they see: research investigates this process of producing meaning as it occurs over time within responses to the screen. People draw on their cultural background to generate understanding of media events. Hence interpretivists can be referred to as Culturalists. Consumer interpreted branding narratives incorporate reasons for aligning or identifying with product use. Given their qualitatively subtle focus, the issue is mathematical measurement: how are such data quantified? Interpretivism needs a statistical package to “triangulate” its findings.

I paint this initial presentation of philosophy and research method with a broad brush. For distinguishing in practice between inductivists and interpretivists can be difficult. Researchers may be statistically inclined but equally seek to categorically accommodate as the foundation of their measurement an audience's articulating meaning for marketing on screen. Moreover, my distinction relates to a broader methodological struggle occurring between Positivists and Phenomenology over conceptualizing the nature of human and social inquiry. Considered as philosophers of science, the first group of theorists link causal judgment about observable events with universal natural law.

Media cultivation theory is a clear candidate for the inductivist would-be causalist category. Television's “images cultivate the dominant tendencies of our culture's beliefs, ideologies and world views”:here “the ‘size’ of a (program's) ‘effect’ is far less critical than the direction of its steady contribution” (Gerbner et al., 1980: 14). Surprisingly, “despite four decades of (media) cultivation research demonstrating a reliable, albeit small, cultivation relationship, questions remain about the mechanisms that link exposure to perception” conclude Bilandzic and Busselle (2008: 508).

Nonetheless, these latter authors assert inductively that where “transportation” or “losing one's self in a (screen) narrative” occurs, “repeated highly transportive experiences contribute to the overall cultivation effect by adjusting the viewers’ worldviews after each exposure”: thus the “constant presence of stories with similar messages may be absorbed by audiences and alter their understanding of social reality” (ibid.: 508, 509). Such “adjusted,” “absorbed” and “altered” audiences are surely passive recipients of the media's “world-views” in their “understanding (of) social reality” as a caused consequence of continuing screen “exposure.”²

Similarly, a “mechanism” is proposed in a discussion of the brand–consumer relationship. While in this instance the latter may not entirely involve an audience's conscious attention the “automatic processes” proposed would surely exclude the relationship being one of reason-giving. Here, frequently perceived coffee branding (“repeated exposures to a brand”) is conceptualized as “driving (an) effect” on consumers “via automatic processes (…) (as an) underlying mechanism”:

On any given morning, one might pass several people with Starbucks coffee in hand. What are the effects of such repeated exposures to a brand? (…) (We) focus on situations during which these effects occur via automatic processes (whose) ease of processing (characterizes the) underlying mechanism driving this effect.

(Ferraro et al., 2009: 729, 731)

In the inductivist causalist camp, more or less determinate mechanisms link screen (or shop front) content with the formation of audience and consumer evaluative beliefs or attitudes. Such a causalist model of attaching attitudes must be attractive to positivists. For conceptualizing attitude formation in its sequential and statistical terms can present the process as conforming to laws and hence the deductive-nomological model of explanation at the heart of positivism. Here, being able to predict on the basis of positive correlation (preferably the constant conjunction of observable events) leads inexorably to the capacity to explain: explanation is symmetrical with prediction.

In a definitive editorial recommendation establishing the “Primary of Theory” for the European Journal of Marketing, Lee and Greenley (2008) write with approval that:

one of the truly great theorists in marketing, Shelby Hunt, described theory as “a systematically related set of statements, including some lawlike generalizations, that is empirically testable (…) a systematized structure capable of both explaining and predicting phenomena.”

(Hunt, 1991: 4)

Inductivist causalist theory is implicitly engaged in “lawlike generalization.” A propositional causal candidate for nomological (law) status would be that, other circumstances being equal, when repeated consumer exposures to satisfied Brand X coffee drinkers (“with Brand X coffee in hand”) take place a favorable consumer attitude towards that brand of coffee will result.

From the perspective of the interpretive or culturalist model, however, the perception of agents as passive inherent in this theory of attitude formation is unacceptable. For consumers actively recognize, anticipate and articulate advertising's prescriptive screen narrative from its elliptical or indeterminate elements by drawing on a wider knowledge of generic textual type.

In the present volume, the causal formation of attitudes is replaced by a cognitively active audience's alignment with (or distancing alienation from) a text's prescriptive meaning. “We are like them.” Such “borrowing” to attach oneself to the significance of a global brand is premised upon viewer identification or alignment with narrative agent made possible by local cultural similarities to media content. Successful world marketing is particularly glocal.

Connections between branding and buying are not the main focus of a book on audiences forming attitudes. But the latter are considered in marketing as the basis of predictable behavior:

Why does the attitude concept maintain its unparalleled popularity? One possible answer is that the concept is central to the observer's dream: “If only I knew your attitude, I could predict your thoughts and behavior.”

(Schwarz, 2006: 20)

Again this nexus is of interest to positivists as potentially nomological since they consider prediction of effects is allowed by knowledge of law-governed causal events. However, attitudes are evaluative beliefs, not events: and in any case predicting economic decision-making or buying has drawn on theory of reasoned action rather than causal models implying participant passivity (Lunt, 1995). The philosophical or conceptual assumptions of predicting need certainly not be positivist.³

Global Advertising does not purport, then, to discuss the relationship between consumer attitude and action (buying). However, the volume ventures to consider how audiences relate their perception of marketing narrative to themselves, connecting content to conception of the self. We will discuss, that is, how encultured consumers articulate and appropriate meaning from screen media and shopping malls (whose spaces, I shall argue, are structurally similar). In this emphasis on cultural and narrative intricacy my perspective clearly differs from (for instance) the economic theory of reasoned action and preference in purchasing [as set out by Ajzen (1988)].

Within interpretive theory guided by philosophical insights from phenomenology, the audience of consumer citizens who view media marketing are found always already located upon habitual “horizons” of concrete being and cultural understanding upon which they rarely turn to focus. Shaping the perceptual process, these generic frameworks of comprehension within which we continually interpret new experience as instantiating an already known (“pre-cognitive”) type are thus semi-effaced or half-hidden. Nonetheless, situated on these sites of sense-making, recognizing the world as exemplifying categories of which they are aware, people continually anticipate (or “project”) events. Pursuing a “hermeneutic circle of understanding” they attempt to articulate occurrence into coherent narrative. Audiences shape into a story elliptical segments on screen.

In screen theory of the last century, contradictory texts constructed by the political avant-garde were considered to bring about an alienated revolutionary audience critical of capitalism (see Wilson, 1993). The passive workers were (re)produced as active instruments of historical change.

Now, incorporating political diversity, hermeneutic media marketing theory can show how consumers seek in the cognitive play of their responses to provide apparently conflicting elements (or antinomies) of advertising with coherent narrative meaning. Irresolvable contradiction and complexity may be read still as distancing. But products can be branded as the source of coherence.

In talking to them and learning during focus groups and interviews of their responses, we attempt to bring consumer consciousness a little closer to discern in more detail the structure of their understanding marketing on media. One Malaysian television branding narrative for Coca-Cola features a vigorously edited ball game occupying a city centre street. During our research on responses a Chinese male viewer was concerned to reconcile the apparent contradiction between the vigorous demands of outdoor basketball he sees on screen and constricting enclosure of the body by baju kurung Malay dress worn by one of the players:

it's controversial [the scenes before the female are “outdoor” look—activism, while the Malay female looks like an “indoor” girl, walking slow and wearing baju kurung, which (means) she can't play basketball like the other female does. However, she can still play it] kind of breaking the rules.

The “Malay female” drinking Coca-Cola is seen by this Chinese viewer (as enabling him) to resolve the contradiction between basketball and baju kurung, the conflict between energetic creativity and encompassing constraint! Thereby freed by viewers from the tyranny of paradox, elliptical marketing stories offer audiences who align themselves with such action, powerful reasons to appropriate a drink or other mode of dynamism as an aspect of their life-worlds. Contradictions can be resolved by bringing advertised artifacts into the branding narrative—demonstrating their value (or foregrounding their potency) as problem resolving products. Going along with this outcome, in so identifying or consensually connecting with content, consumers transform a moment (aspect) of their living. They have produced ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements and Co-Researchers
• Introduction
• 1 Audiences Articulating Advertising
• 2 Beyond Attitudes: To the Audience Itself! Understanding Consumers: Interpretive Inductivism
• 3 Interpreting Place Branding: Absorbing or Alienating?
• 4 From Productive Consumer to Reflective Citizen: A Reception Study of Advertising Academia Online
• 5 Cellphone Connections: Audiences Activating Agora
• 6 Mall-eable Media Marketing: “Give Reality the Slip?”
• 7 Banks, Blogging and Reflexive Branding
• Conclusion: Note for a Method of Marketing Research
• Appendix: Constructing Marketed Meaning from Consumer Culture Two Television Advertisements: A Reception Study
• Notes
• References
• Index