The Psychology of Advertising

Bob M. Fennis, Wolfgang Stroebe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000180381
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Advertising
• Index: Business

The Psychology of Advertising offers a comprehensive exploration of theory and research in (consumer) psychology on how advertising impacts the thoughts, emotions and actions of consumers. It links psychological theories and empirical research findings to real-life industry examples, showing how scientific research can inform marketing practice.

Advertising is a ubiquitous and powerful force, seducing us into buying wanted and sometimes unwanted products and services, donating to charitable causes, voting for political candidates and changing our health-related lifestyles for better or worse. This revised and fully updated third edition of The Psychology of Advertising offers a comprehensive and state-of-the art overview of psychological theorizing and research on the impact of online and offline advertising and discusses how the traces consumers leave on the Internet (their digital footprint) guides marketers in micro-targeting their advertisements. The new edition also includes new coverage of big data, privacy, personalization and materialism, and engages with the issue of the replication crisis in psychology, and what that means in relation to studies in the book.

Including a glossary of key concepts, updated examples and illustrations, this is a unique and invaluable resource for advanced undergraduate and graduate students and instructors. Suitable for psychology, advertising, marketing and media courses. It is also a valuable guide for professionals working in advertising, public health, public services and political communication.

Chapter 1

Setting the stage

The origins of modern-day advertising

Advertising in practice: the nuts and bolts of the industry

The functions of advertising

The effects of advertising: a psychological perspective

Consumer responses

Source and message variables in advertising

Advertising in context: integrated marketing communications and the promotional mix

Classic and contemporary approaches of conceptualizing advertising effectiveness

The replication crisis in psychology

Plan of the book

Summary and conclusions

As I woke up this morning and stumbled to the bathroom to refresh, I barely noticed the brand of toothbrush and toothpaste I used. I couldn’t escape the brand of breakfast cereal though, because it screamed at me in huge typeface to enjoy my Coco Pops. I wanted to check the morning news, so switched on the television, only to find a seemingly endless sequence of commercials on every channel I selected, urging me to buy more cereal, get a consumer loan, choose shampoo X instead of Y, collect a great offer at the nearest car dealership and phone lawyer Z when I had a conflict at work. I had no interest in any of these products or services. Before setting off for work, I saw a glimpse of yesterday’s football match, but the billboards surrounding the playing field were more visible than the ball, so the sponsoring only distracted me from what I wanted to see. On my way to the train station I passed numerous signs, billboards and shop windows, each with their own message and several repeating the same message I had seen a mile back. Of course, I did not want to attend to them, and wasn’t even able to do so, since I was using my smartphone to watch a video and email a friend. It was only 8.00 a.m., but by now I had been exposed to over 250 commercial messages ranging from brand names and packaging to billboards, online ads, television ads and sponsored events. And of course, none of these messages had in any way affected me, my mood, my thinking or my actions, because I had other things on my mind and a busy schedule to follow. Or had they?

After reading this book, the answer to this question will be yes, and in more ways than the actor of this anecdote or the reader might have imagined. Although people’s lives differ, there is at least one constant, particularly among those living in Western and Asian-Pacific hyper-industrialized societies and that is the ubiquitous presence of advertising. Indeed, the average US consumer is thought to be exposed to more than 1,000 commercial messages each day. Did you ever wonder whether and how this advertising works? How consumers make sense of advertising messages? What types of messages ‘get across’, when and why? What impact advertising has on consumer emotions, thoughts and behaviour? That is what this book is about.

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 (Belch & Belch, 2004; Tellis, 2004; Yeshin, 2006). This definition has recently been challenged by Johar (2016), who argued that the most recent developments in advertising practice, particularly with regard to online and social media advertising, suggest that it may, or may not be paid (as when consumer fans or foes of a brand post 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). In the present chapter, we set the stage for what is to come in the following chapters by providing the reader with a grasp of the business, societal and academic contexts in which the material in the other chapters must be situated. As such, the present chapter will touch briefly on several issues that are dealt with in more detail in the coming chapters and will highlight the origins and settings of contemporary thinking and research on the psychology of advertising and its translations in advertising practice. In particular, we will discuss how advertising practice has evolved through history, how it manifests itself presently, how it is organized, what functions it has in society and how thinking about its effects has developed to where we are now. We conclude this chapter with an outline of the contents of the other chapters.

The origins of modern-day advertising

Advertising has a considerable history. As McDonald and Scott (2007) claim, the first type of advertising was what we now term ‘outdoor advertising’. Archaeologists have unearthed tradesmen’s and tavern signs from ancient civilizations such as Egypt and Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome, indicating that traders and merchants were keen to tell their community what they had to sell and at what price. Similarly, ads for slaves and household products have been found in early written records of the period. Later, town criers and travelling merchants advertised goods and services and in so doing became the forerunners of today’s voice-overs in television and radio ads (McDonald & Scott, 2007). The Industrial Revolution between 1730 and 1830 especially boosted advertising practice. This increase can be partly explained by the large-scale diffusion of the division of labour that increasingly necessitated informing consumers of the availability of goods and services, the creation of which they were no longer directly involved in, and partly because the Industrial Revolution greatly accelerated the scale of production, creating an obvious impetus for manufacturers to advertise in order to sell their stock. As a result, markets transformed from being mainly local to regional and finally even global. The Industrial Revolution also illustrates the pivotal role of advertising as a necessary lubricant for economic traffic. Without advertising, we would not be aware that certain products or services exist and consumption would wane. This in turn would directly slow down production.

A ‘side effect’ of these trends was the creation and growing importance of the consumer brand: the label with which to designate an individual product and differentiate it from competitors. Since production and consumption became distinct in time and space, consumers needed such an unequivocal label with which they could identify the product of their choice amid alternatives. Hence, advertising practitioners (who by the mid to end of the Industrial Revolution started to exclusively work as such and thereby created an entirely new profession) were quick to assign unique labels to products and associate them with unique advantages not shared by competitors. The unique selling proposition (USP) was born, a summary statement used to meaningfully differentiate the brand from the competition. The creation of a compelling USP was to grow to be the key challenge for professional advertisers in ‘building’ new consumer brands.

The American Civil War and, 50 years later, World War I temporarily slowed down production, only to see an ‘afterburner effect’ after hostilities ceased and societies had to be rebuilt. After the Depression years and World War II, advertising volumes skyrocketed again, to keep up with the production and consumption pace of the period. The post-war economic boom enabled ever more consumers on an ever-widening scale to enjoy new products and services, and the concomitant mass introduction of television increased advertising’s reach at an unprecedented rate. This trend is mirrored by the present-day proliferation of the Internet as an advertising medium (see Chapter 8). More generally, a brief history of advertising should include a brief discussion of the evolution of the chief carriers of these ad messages throughout history: the advertising media.

The earliest forms of advertising, as noted, used ‘outdoor media’: clay tablets, placards and, from 1400 onward, handbills and poster bills. Martin Luther used this latter medium when advertising his objections to Roman Catholicism by nailing a poster bill on the Wittenberg church door. Outdoor advertising subsequently evolved from poster bills to billboards, which especially in North America grew to be one of the most eye-catching icons of increased consumerism with brands such as Kellogg’s, Heinz, Coca-Cola and Palmolive covering large parts of US public space.

Newspapers and magazines are among the main advertising media, especially since the acceleration of their development in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. An estimated billion people per day read newspapers, and advertisers have been keen on reaching them, especially with display (regular) ads and classified ads (McDonald & Scott, 2007). Interestingly, despite the introduction of television and, more recently, the Internet, newspapers continue to be a popular advertising medium. Although market shares of classified ads are decreasing mainly due to the Internet, newspaper advertising is still second in volume after television, with 30 per cent of all main media expenditures (McDonald & Scott, 2007). Similarly, the advent of the Internet has not led to the demise of magazine advertising, as audiences are ever more specifically targeted with special interest magazines, which continue to be attractive for advertising aimed at reaching consumer segments that share common interests, values or lifestyles.

Television, radio and the Internet complement the array of contemporary mass media. Whereas radio advertising started in the early 1920s in the United States, television advertising took off two decades later with a Bulova watch commercial being shown before a baseball game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and Philadelphia Phillies (McDonald & Scott, 2007). Despite the Internet, television continues to claim the largest share in ad expenditures. Indeed, global expenditure on television advertising has increased from $147 billion in 2005 to $214 billion in 2019 and is estimated to reach $228 billion in 2020.¹ Finally, Internet advertising started in 1994 and has ever since seen yearly growth rates of over 25 per cent. At present, the Internet appears a complementary rather than a substitute medium. Although it has taken away some of the market share from other media (most notably classified ads in newspapers), the Internet will probably continue to coexist next to more traditional mass media, rather than eliminating them as some media gurus have prophesied. In all, despite its humble origins, advertising has grown to be a flourishing business with spending on advertising reaching $560 billion worldwide by 2019 and expected to grow further in the coming years (statista.com, 2020).

We might look at classic ads with feelings of warm nostalgia or wonder about the sometimes peculiar language use and propositions made, but are the appeals made in those historic ads really fundamentally different from those we find in contemporary advertising? The answer appears to be both yes and no. McDonald and Scott (2007) argue that from the 1800s to the early twentieth century virtually all print ads used what we would nowadays term an informational or argument-based appeal. They straightforwardly informed consumers what was for sale, at what price and where one could buy it. The approach became known as the ‘tell’ approach, a more subtle variant of the more pressing ‘hard-sell’ approach of ‘salemanship in print’, which aligned a set of persuasive arguments to convince prospective buyers and thus became known as the ‘reason-why approach’ (Rowsome, 1970, see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1Vintage ad using an informational appeal

Partly as a reaction to this aggressive approach, a more subtle ‘soft-sell’ approach was developed in the early 1900s, which sometimes used an emotional or affect-based appeal, aiming to influence the consumer’s feelings and emotions rather than his thoughts. The development of the soft-sell approach was in line with the societal and academic trend of the time increasingly to view human nature as governed by instinct, emotions and non-rational processes (Beard, 2005). Despite the impression that the discussion may have given thus far, Fox (1984) has stated that argument-based and affect-based appeals have coexisted through the ages, rather than one approach evolving out of the other. Hence, even the beginning of the twentieth century saw illustrations of emotional appeals next to informational ads much like we see today. Indeed, in today’s advertising practice, hard-sell and soft-sell appeals still coexist, and sometimes reflect distinct philosophies of the ad agencies about what works in advertising (i.e. use of arguments versus use of emotional appeals to sell products; Kardes, 2002).

Advertising in practice: the nuts and bolts of the industry

How do ad campaigns come about? Typically, the starting point is the strategic objective of a firm to promote its brand. Sometimes, particularly if the firm is of sufficient size and professionalism, this objective has been translated by its own marketing department into a concrete briefing to an ad agency (see Broderick & Pickton, 2005). In the briefing the firm states what the campaign needs to accomplish in terms of marketing and communication objectives (see later in this chapter), how it relates to other marketing efforts by the firm, what the firm knows about the target consumer segment, what it knows about the competition, the available budget and the time planning for the campaign. These elements then form the building blocks for the ad agency.

The agency then typically takes over from there, but in close collaboration with their client. If needed, they may conduct (additional) market research, then develop the basic campaign concept and its translation into the core message, the type of appeal (see later in this chapter), the ‘promotions mix’ (i.e. how the core message is translated into different messages, to be carried by different advertising media, for different subsegments of the target group) and the media planning. The media planning part is sometimes executed by more specialized subcontractors and involves calculating the proportion per medium of the target consumer segment that can be effectively reached by different offline and/or online media. Typically, the largest part of the ad budget is spent on buying media time and space.

Once the key message, promotions mix and media mix have been determined and approved by the client, the ad agency will translate these ingredients into a creative concept. This is the part where the agency performs its creative magic, but it is also the part where intuitions, gut feelings, idiosyncratic conceptions of ‘best practices’ and agency ideology can ruin much of the systematic hard work that went into the briefing. Indeed, there is still a striking lack of systematic, research-driven knowledge at many, even prominent ad agencies on what type of message elements may be effective for what type of consumer under what conditions, a void the present book may fill.

This concept needs to be approved by the client firm. A decision aid here would be for the agency to conduct a ‘concept test’, or to have that test conducted by a specialized market research agency. Such a concept test usually takes the form of qualitative research, i.e. open-ended, semi-structured interviews, either with single representatives of the target consumer segment or a group-wise interview in the form of a ‘focus group’. The participants in this concept task are given a detailed description of the main campaign message and in some cases the ad agency has already developed a few ‘prototypes’ of ad messages (such as a storyboard of a television commercial or a concept print ad).

The concept test aims to yield a (necessarily crude) idea of whether the campaign will be able to attain the set objectives (the communication objectives, that is, not t...