More about attitudes and social norms

Question 1

What did Kilbourne, 1999 say about advertising?

Answer 1

‘Almost everyone holds the misguided belief that advertisements don’t affect them, don’t shape their attitudes, don’t help define their dreams, but that it works on other people’

Question 2

Give figures to support the statement that advertising is a big business

Answer 2

• UK companies spend more than 14 billion a year on advertising
• Almost half a million advertising and marketing jobs in the UK economy
• One million UK jobs depend on advertising. Take up 70% of British Newspaper space.

Question 3

What was the old definition of advertising (Bovee, 1992; Belch and Belch , 2004) ?

Answer 3

any form of non-personal paid communication aimed to inform and/or persuade target audiences about a product, services or idea

Question 4

Why is Bovee’s definition of advertising outdated?

Answer 4

Advertising has become increasingly targeted and personal

Question 5

What is Petty and Cacioppo’s (1986) Elaboration Likelihood Model: Dual Process Model of Persuasion?

Answer 5

• Either:
- Source message (input) -> High ability and motivation (processing strategy) -> central route -> Persuasion (output)
- Source message (input) -> low ability or motivation -> peripheral route -> Persuasion (output)
• Basic idea that there are two routes of persuasion: central route and the peripheral route

Question 6

What is the central route of persuasion?

Answer 6

involves carefully attending to an argument/ carefully thinking about a message in an advert and systematically scrutinizing the information contained in the advert

Question 7

What is the process of thinking about the message in an advert called and when is it post frequent?

Answer 7

• The process of thinking about the message is called ‘Elaboration’ and is most frequent when:
  1. The consumer is highly motivated
  2. The consumer is high in ability

Question 8

What is the Peripheral persuasion route?

Answer 8

• We very often do not think carefully about (i.e. elaborate on) the message
• Often we do NOT follow Central Route (cognitively lazy, fatigued, time pressure, product is trivial, low motivation, low ability)
• We may not even attend to the message consciously at all but we still take in some content subconsciously
• Persuasion then can also result from peripheral cues in the target message

Question 9

What are some cues that tend to influence behaviour via the peripheral route?

Answer 9

• Social proof
• Mere exposure
• Humour
• Perceived Scarcity

Question 10

What was Cialdini’s (2001) experiment about the bandwagon effect and tipping behaviour and what were the results?

Answer 10

• Cialdidi (2001): Asked music students to busk in the street (sing and play guitar)
• In one condition the guitar case was empty. In the second condition the guitar case had been purposefully filled with money
• Waited to see how much money the busker made (DV). Repeated trials over different days to control for time of day, weather etc.
• Found that buskers with money already in guitar case made more money
• Study shows we use the behaviour of the majority to guide out behaviour. We ‘jump in the bandwagon’

Question 11

What did Cialdini (2007) say in regards to the bandwagon effect?

Answer 11

People have an innate drive to copy others; decisions and behaviour

Question 12

What did Forsyth (2018) say in regards to the bandwagon effect?

Answer 12

Being part of a group/ following the behaviours of others, helps reduce risk and is (normally) beneficial for survival

Question 13

What are social norms in advertising?

Answer 13

• E.g. 9 out of 10 people recommend something
• Social norms use social influence to persuade people to ‘jump on the bandwagon’ get with the majority. Uses informational and normative social influence.

Question 14

What was Joerg and Kwon’s (2012) experiment to test the effectiveness of the bandwagon effect?

Answer 14

• Participants shown a mock-up of an online shopping page selling USB drives
• Randomly allocated to one of two conditions. Positive Social Norm condition (94% of consumers bought this product after viewing this site’) while the other half were not exposed to this claim
• Afterwards, rated purchase intention: How likely are you to buy the product (7-point scale)
• Found that more customers were likely to buy it after positive social norm conditioning
• But really hard to actually assess people’s behaviour

Question 15

What is the mere exposure effect?

Answer 15

Psychological phenomenon by which people develop an increase in positive affect, resulting from the repeated presentation of previously unfamiliar stimuli

Question 16

How is the mere exposure effect utilised in advertising?

Answer 16

• Suggests that consumers do not need to pay conscious attention to advertisements and it may explain why some companies use ‘minimal’ advertising strategies
• There is now research that shows that the simple repetition of images and brands is enough to generate a ‘memory trace’ in the consumer’s mind and unconsciously affect their preferences for a specific product (Shapiro, Machinnis and Heckler, 1997)
• The more consumers see a brand the more they like it
• Positive preferences can be generated independently of conscious processing

Question 17

How is the mere exposure effect used in in game advertising?

Answer 17

• Company pays a game company to include the brand in their game
• Often people playing the game don’t mention that they have seen the adverts in the game

Question 18

What’s Kim and Leng (2017) experiment to show the mere exposure effect of product placement?

Answer 18

• Kim and Leng (2017): randomly assigned participants to play a sports video game repeatedly for either (1) 12 mins, (2) 36 mins, (3) 84 mins
• These games included adverts placed around stadia/pitches
• Logic was that the longer participants played the game the more they would encounter the adverts and, in line with the mere exposure effect, the more they will like them
• Measured:
• Brand recall: what brands can you remember?
• Average recall: 1-2 brands
• Brands recognition: showed them names of 10 brands (half had been in the game and half had not and asked them to identify those in the game)
• Generally participants were better at the recognition task that the recall task. So there is an unconscious memory trace
• Participants who had played longer had a better recall
• Measured:
• Attitudes (liking) and purchase intention (willingness to buy):
- Found that those who played the games for longest were more likely to have more positive attitudes and were more likely to purchase the product.

Question 19

What’s Fang et al. experiment about the mere exposure effect in regards to banner ads

Answer 19

• Fang et al. asked Ps to read an article on online education with banner ads rotating around article for five seconds
• Some of the ads were presented either 0 times, 5 times or 20 times
• When liking for the different banner ads were assessed at the end, frequency of exposure had a significant positive effect on attitudes
- Important to remember that we wouldn’t be consciously attending to banner ads but it would be in your peripheral vision

Question 20

What do researchers generally agree that humour is?

Answer 20

A pleasurable experience that arises from an idea or event that is in some sense incongruous (e.g. Alden, Mukerjee and Hoyer, 2000)

Question 21

How many television ads contain humour appeals? (Bear 2005; Alden, Hoyer and Lee 1993)

Answer 21

about 1/5

Question 22

What is the incongruity-resolution theory

Answer 22

• Most common type of humour used in adverts (Alden, Hoyer, Lee 1993)
• Exists when the meaning of the advert is not immediately clear. When the meaning is eventually determined the result is misattributed as a pleasant sensation and a more favourable attitude towards the advert (Flaherty, Weinberger and Gulas 2004)
• The pleasure derived from incongruity is the divergence from expectation and the greater the divergence the funnier the material

Question 23

How effective is humour in advertising?

Answer 23

• Humour increases consumers’ recall of events in advertisements (Cline and Kellaris, 2007) – BUT not necessarily the brand/product
• Humour enhances liking of both the advertisement and the advertised brand (O’Guinn, Allen and Semenik, 2000)
• Humour lowers resistance to advertising and tops critical evaluation (O’Guinn, Allen and Semenik, 2000)
• Depends on demographics and the product

Question 24

What is the theory behind scarcity appeals?

Answer 24

Scare items often tend to be valuable and in turn people appear to perceive value in items that are scarce

Question 25

What was Worshel, Lee and Adewole’s (1975) experiment to do with scarcity?

Answer 25

presented to groups of Ps with a jar of cookies. In one jar there were 10 cookies, in the other only 2. Ps rated how much they wanted a cookie and how good the cookie tasted. Though the cookies and jars were identical, participants valued the ones in the near-empty jar more highly

Question 26

What are the different ways in which scarcity appeals can be signalled?

Answer 26

via quantative appeals, limited supply or time restraints

Question 27

How do scarcity appeals affect consumers?

Answer 27

have a positive effect on consumers’ desirability for a product and lead to increased purchasing

Question 28

What are the factors that affect the strength of the relationship between scarcity and purchase intention/ behaviour?

Answer 28

1. Anticipatory regret (Swain, Hanna, and Abendroth, 2006)
2. Need for uniqueness (Tafarodi et al. 2004)
3. Increased arousal (Nichols, 2012)
4. Impaired cognition leading to heuristics (Cialdini, 2008) (don’t properly think about it and start to overvalue things that aren’t that valuable)