Consumer Behavior: The Psychology of Advertising
The study of consumers helps firms and organizations improve their marketing strategies by understanding issues such as the psychology of how consumers think, feel, reason, and select between different alternatives; the psychology of how the consumer is influenced by his or her environment; the behavior of consumers while shopping or making other marketing decisions; limitations in consumer knowledge or information processing abilities influence decisions and marketing outcome; how consumer motivation and decision strategies differ between products that differ in their level of importance or interest that they entail for the consumer; and how marketers can adapt and improve their marketing campaigns and marketing strategies to more effectively reach the consumer (Perner, 1999).
Consumer behavior is 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 (Perner, 1999). Likewise, consumer behavior has been defined as the acquisition, consumption and disposition of products, services, time and ideas by decision making units (Jacoby, 1976).
Butler and Peppard (1998) argue that the heart of marketing management is to understand consumer psychology. Kotler (2000) also suggests that for marketers to successfully communicate with their customers they need to study the behavior of consumers. Understanding consumers has become the focus of attention in the business world due to the fact that the prosperity of companies is heavily dependent on satisfying customers and keeping them loyal (Kotler, 2000).
Consumer behavior involves the use and disposal of products as well as the study of how they are purchased. Product use is often of great interest to the marketer, because this may influence how a product is best positioned or how we can encourage increased consumption. It also involves services and ideas as well as tangible products. The impact of consumer behavior on society is of relevance (Perner, 1999).
Research on sensation and perception, attention, categorization, inference making, information search, memory, attitude and behavior, attitude formation and formation, conditioning and satisfaction have been undertaken to understand consumer behavior (Jacobi, Johar & Motrin, 1998).
In the area of sensation and perception, most works are confined primarily to visual or auditory processes. On the other hand, research on consumer attention focus on advertising applications (Jacobi, Johar & Motrin, 1998). Attention refers to the momentary focusing of processing capacity on a particular stimulus. Among the studies on this area include those of Russo and Leclerc (1994) who examined attention to packages on store shelves, as measured by eye fixations; and Janiszewski (1993) who examined the impact of pre-attentive ad processing on affective response to brand names. Engel et al. (1995) show that felt involvement plays a motivational role in consumers‘ attention and comprehension processes. The degree of personal involvement is the most important factor that shapes the type of decision-process and the following purchasing behavior (Engel et al., 1995).
After being detected and attended to, stimuli must be categorized. An example of research in categorization is by Goodstein (1993) who utilized categorization theory to explain why ads that are atypical of an ad schema tend to provoke more extensive processing. Perracchio and Tybout (1996) related the categorization theory to brand equity and extension. Further, Lefkoff-Hagins & Mason (1993) showed that products perceived to be similar are not always similarly liked. This is because cognitive judgments of similarity are based on different product attributes than are judgments of preference.
Politz (1929) felt a broad understanding of the psychological influences on behavior was critical to the development of successful advertising messages and theory, and felt that dogmatically clutching to theory leads to a shallow understanding of advertising effects. He also understood that there are multiple psychological influences impacting a reader of advertising. Moreover, Politz (1929) felt advertising was best understood through a marriage of psychology and theory. The psychological influences noted by Politz (1929) had implications for creative execution, media research and research methodology.
Researchers on consumer behavior are increasingly turning to the study of the use of metaphors, which may be thought of as special types of categories. Spiggle (1994) discussed metaphors as a way to interpret qualitative data. Interest in metaphors and analogies is likely to increase, as advertisers of ever more technological products seek ways to communicate product features in an easily understandable manner (Jacobi, Johar & Motrin, 1998).
In the area of inference making, studies shows that consumers may choose to think more about stimuli after they have been categorized and develop additional beliefs based on the stimulus information. Consumer inference making has been examined in terms of applications to advertising communications. According to Johar (1995), highly involved consumers draw inferences from incomplete comparison ad claims at the time of processing the ad. Campbell (1995), on the other hand, examined the negative inferences consumers make about advertiser intent when attention-getting tactics.
Most of the work in information search focuses on consumers’ conscious efforts to obtain information about durable goods or those associated with high financial or social risk (Jacobi, Johar & Motrin, 1998). Examples of these works include those of Putsis and Srinivasan (1994) who modeled the search patterns of new car buyers; Leong (1993), who examined information search for low-involvement goods among Hong Kong consumers; and Grewal and Marmorstein (1994) who examined the amount of price search that takes place as a function of the absolute size of the price of an item.
A research on memory suggested that memory has had a subordinate role in theorizing about consumer decision processes because the majority of this research has focused on advertising effects rather than on choice behavior (Alba et al., 1991). Much work on memory continued to revolve around factors that affect memory for advertising (Jacobi, Johar & Motrin, 1998). Factors that affect advertising retrieval such as encoding strategy were examined by Friestad and Thorson (1993). Brown and Rothschild (1993) found that consumer memory remained steady or improved as number of ads increased, although it is generally thought that advertising clutter reduces recall. Moreover, Singh et al. (1994) found that it is better for ads to have been spaced with a significant time lag when memory is measured after a long delay.
According to the most frequently used definition offered by Allport (1935), attitudes are a learned predisposition to respond to an object or class of objects in a consistently favorable or unfavorable way. Although an attitude is a complex construct, in simple terms it represents the kind of things people like or dislike (Allport, 1935). Attitudes towards purchase behavior are believed to be shaped by many factors such as direct experience with the product, information acquired from others, exposure to mass media etc (Cobanoglu, Ekinci & Park, 2001).
In understanding consumer behavior, research on attitude structure, formation, and change remains a dominant focus, borrowing theoretical models from social psychology. The persuasion model of Friestad and Wright (1994) shows the uniqueness of the consumer context. Friestad and Wright (1994) suggest that knowledge about persuasion agents’ goals and tactics can influence attitudes, and that researchers must incorporate this factor into their models.
According to Woodside and Lysonski (1989), attitudes towards purchasing, the demographics of customers and information processing behavior are essential elements for explaining customers‘ purchasing behavior. Furthermore, the majority of prominent consumer behavior researchers argue that the concept of involvement is central to the understanding of consumer information processing (Engel et al., 1995).
There is general agreement that attitude represents a summary evaluation of a psychological object captured in such attribute dimensions as good-bad, harmful-beneficial, pleasant-unpleasant, and likable-dislikable (Ajzen & Fishbein 2000). Recent neurological evidence suggests that evaluative judgments differ in important ways from nonevaluative judgments (Ajzen, 2001).
The idea that attitudes are dispositions to evaluate psychological objects would seem to imply that there is only one attitude toward any given object or issue; however this may be too simplistic a conception (Ajzen, 2001). According to Wilson et al. (2000), when attitudes change, the new attitude overrides but may not replace the old attitude. According to this model of dual attitudes, people can simultaneously hold two different attitudes toward a given object in the same context, one attitude implicit or habitual, the other explicit (Ajzen, 2001).
Depending on perspective, different evaluations of the same object in different contexts can be considered evidence for multiple attitudes toward the same object, or attitudes toward different psychological objects. McConnell et al. (1997) have found one mechanism for the development of different context-dependent attitudes in the presence of illusory correlations between a target’s behavior and the context in which the behavior is observed. Moreover, McConnell et al. (1997) suggest that discrepancies between attitudes and behavior may reflect the presence of multiple context-dependent attitudes toward social targets.
Advertising messages are more complex, have a goal of persuasion, and often contain both verbal and visual elements; advertising messages differ from other messages examined in social psychology (Jacobi, Johar & Motrin, 1998). Petty and Cacioppo (1981), in their study on persuasion in advertising use the Elaboration Likelihood Model. Meyers-Levy & Peracchio (1994) focused on images in advertising and found that cropping objects irrelevant to verbal ad claims enhanced product evaluations of subjects motivated to process the ad. A year later, Meyers-Levy & Peracchio (1995) found that use of color in an ad only improves persuasion when consumers have the ability to process the message. Moreover, In addition, Pham (1996) challenged the prevailing view that diminished ability increases reliance on an ad’s peripheral cues.
Earlier, Heath et al. (1994) found that peripheral ad cues, such as spokesperson fame and copy vividness, influenced attitudes only in competitive settings. This research has also found that peripheral cues can be processed elaborately and be effective even when involvement is high (Jacobi, Johar & Motrin, 1998). Bumkrant and Unnava (1995) found that the use of self-referencing in ads increased message elaboration and persuasion when message arguments were strong. Meyers-Levy and Peracchio (1996) found that, for subjects motivated to attend to an ad, a moderate increase in self-referencing enhances persuasion, whereas an extreme increase undermines it.
According to Jacobi, Johar and Motrin (1998), classical conditioning theory suggests that the repeated pairing of a neutral stimulus with a stimulus known to elicit a desired response will result in a transfer of affect from the latter to the former. Janiszewski & Warlop (1993) reported that classical conditioning increased attention and transferred meaning. Moreover, Kim et al. (1996) found that brand attitudes can be conditioned not only through direct affect transfer but also through the formation of inferential beliefs
Research on consumer satisfaction has tried to pin down its determinants and to differentiate it from other constructs, such as evaluation. Customer satisfaction refers to the consumer’s positive subjective evaluation of the outcomes and experiences associated with using or consuming the product or service (Padilla, 1996). Satisfaction occurs when the product has been able to meet or exceed the conceived expectations that the customer has (Padilla, 1996). Furthermore, customer satisfaction may also be considered as the measure of the high degree of quality of the product (Jacobs et al., 1998).
Spreng et al (1996) proposed a new model of satisfaction that builds on the well-established expectation disconfirmation paradigm by including attribute satisfaction, information satisfaction, and the impact of marketing communications in a single model. Arnould and Price (1993) examined satisfaction derived from white-water rafting and described the experience as one of hedonic consumption; they also suggested a weak link between expectations and satisfaction. Gardial et al (1994) differentiated satisfaction from postpurchase evaluation experiences and found that consumers understand the two constructs differently. However, consumers’ interpretations of satisfaction do not appear to differ from their evaluations of service quality (Iacobucci et al 1995).
Research on deceptive advertising is rare (Kim, Lord & Putrevu, 1997). Deceptive advertising is an ethical problem which can mislead consumers. This can occur in subtle ways that are difficult to establish as outright deception. Researchers have called for more conceptual and empirical research to help consumers recognize and discount deceptive messages (Andreasen, 1991). The study of Kim, Lord and Putrevu (1997) explored the factors that moderate consumer susceptibility to deceptive advertising and strategies that help prevent their being deceived by false or misleading claims. In their work, factors such as copy style of an ad, the consumer’s frame of reference at the time of message exposure, the consumer’s store of product-relevant information in memory and the ability of products to influence the consumer’s frame of reference, were examined.
Politz (1929) believed that advertising does not have to wrap itself in tricks, false pretense and misrepresentation; the advertised article itself should attract and captivate the reader, appealing to their intelligence. Advertising should not only be void of misleading statements; it should encourage truth in advertising.
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