Advertising and the Mind of the Consumer

What works, what doesn't and why

Max Sutherland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000248456
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

By the time we die, we will have spent an estimated one and a half years just watching TV commercials. Advertising is an established and ever-present force and yet, as we move into the new century, just how it works continues to be something of a mystery.In this 3rd international edition of Advertising and the Mind of the Consumer, renowned market researcher and psychologist Max Sutherland reveals the secrets of successful campaigns over a wide range of media, including the web and new media. Using many well-known international ads as examples, this book takes us into the mind of the consumer to explain how advertising messages work - or misfire - and why. Advertising and the Mind of the Consumer is not just a 'how to' book of tricks for advertisers, it is a book for everyone who wants to know how advertising works and why it influences us-for people in business with products and services to sell, for advertising agents, marketers, as well as for students of advertising and consumer behaviour.'Essential reading for all practitioners and everyone interested in how advertising works.' - John Zeigler, DDB Worldwide.'Finally, a book that evades the 'magic' of advertising and pins down the psychological factors that make an ad succesful or not. It will change the way you advertise and see ads.' - Ignacio Oreamuno, President, ihaveanidea.org'. reveals the secrets of effective advertising gleamed from years of sophisticated advertising research. It should be on every manager's bookshelf.' - Lawrence Ang, Senior Lecturer in Management, Macquarie Graduate School of Management'Breakthrough thinking. I have been consulting in the advertising business and have taught graduate level advertising courses for over 20 years. I have never found a book that brought so much insight to the advertising issues associated with effective selling.' - Professor Larry Chiagouris, Pace University'Puts the psyche of advertising on the analyst's couch to reveal the sometimes surprising mind of commercial persuasion.' - Jim Spaeth, Former President, Advertising Research Foundation

PART A
WHY ADVERTISING HAS REMAINED A MYSTERY FOR SO LONG

INTRODUCTION

The subject of advertising seems to be riddled with mystique and apparent contradictions. This book resolves some of those contradictions. It had its beginnings in regular columns for various trade publications and journals; Part B brings together some of those articles and subsequent articles and more material can be found at www.adandmind.com.

This book is not just aimed at advertisers and their ad agencies but also at the people to whom they advertise. As David Ogilvy, a leading advertising expert, said (in the chauvinistic 1960s): ‘The consumer is not a moron. She is your wife!’¹ Our wives, our husbands, our partners, our children are all consumers. The consumer is not an idiot. The consumer is you and me.

Many years ago the advertiser’s dilemma was expressed in this way: ‘I know that half my advertising is wasted—but I don’t know which half!’² But developments in market research are beginning to change all that by better enabling advertisers to identify what works and what doesn’t.³ This book draws on the experience of tracking week by week the effects of hundreds of advertising campaigns over a period of more than fifteen years.

Almost everybody is interested in advertising. The average consumer is exposed to hundreds of ads every day. By the time we die we will have spent an estimated one and a half years watching TV commercials.⁴ Yet advertising continues to be something of a mystery.

The response ‘Gee, I didn’t know that’ to an advertisement tends to be the exception. A round trip special price to New York for $400 is news. Ads that announce the release of new products like iPhone, the Segway, self cleaning windows or voice-operated computers are news. And if we are someone who is compulsive about germs maybe Mr Clean with a new disinfectant that kills germs 50 per cent better than the old Mr Clean might also be news. With news advertising we can easily recognize the potential of the advertising to affect us.

But most advertising is not ‘news’ advertising. Much of the advertising we encounter doesn’t impart news and it is difficult for us to see how it works on us. As consumers we generally believe it does not really affect us personally. Despite this, advertisers keep on advertising. So something must be working—but on whom, and exactly how?

This book demystifies the effects of advertising and describes some of the psychological mechanisms underlying them. It is written primarily for those who foot the bill for advertising and those who produce advertising. In other words, for those many organizations involved with advertising—the marketing directors, marketing managers, product managers, advertising managers, account execs, media people and creatives. However, in the various editions it has also been read by many interested consumers who wonder how advertising works and why advertisers keep on advertising. Understanding the mechanisms and their limitations tends to lessen the anxieties we may have about wholesale, unconscious manipulation by advertising.

It may come as a surprise to many consumers that those who foot the bill for advertising are often frustrated by knowing little more than the consumers themselves about how, why or when their advertising works. Advertising agencies, the makers of advertising, also know less about these things than we might think. They are seen as wizards at selling, but an agency’s most important pitch is to organizations that want to advertise—companies that will engage the agency’s services to design their advertising on an ongoing basis. To keep clients coming back, advertising agencies need to sell the effectiveness of their advertising to those clients and to the world. Inevitably, some agencies become much more accomplished at selling their clients and the world on the great job the advertising is doing than they do at creating advertising that is truly effective.

Like the skills of tribal healers, ad agencies’ powers and methods are seen to be all the greater because of the mystery that surrounds advertising. Books like Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders⁵ enhance this image of the power of advertising agencies because they portray them as having witch-doctor-like powers. So in a way the mystique and aura of advert ising works in favor of its makers—the advertising agencies—by boosting their image, status and perceived power.

Way back in 1978 Alec Benn, an advertising agency principal in the United States, claimed in his book The 27 Most Common Mistakes in Advertising: ‘There is a great conspiracy participated in by advertising agencies, radio and television stations and networks, advertising consultants, newspapers, magazines and others to mislead corporate management about the effectiveness of advertising.’⁶ Benn was pointing out that advert ising failed more often than it succeeded, usually because its effects ‘are not measured objectively’.

Since then, advertising has begun to be measured more objectively and more often (indeed continuously) and this has highlighted the hard fact that many ads still fail. Part of the reason is that advertising agencies get too little in the way of ‘news’ to work with—there aren’t the breakthrough things to say about existing brands to cause immediate impacts. But the other part of it is a historical overreliance on intuition and introspection.⁷ When these qualities are used instead of objective measurement as the basis for deciding what works and what doesn’t, there are more ads that fail than ads that are outstandingly successful. Sustained effects occur less than half the time.⁸ Until recently these failures stood a good chance of going unrecognized because the majority of campaigns were not tracked in a formal way.⁹

In the general population there are those who believe that advertising is all powerful and that the mechanism of advertising must be unconscious and subliminal, because its effects do not seem open to introspection. Such views are associated with the ‘dark and manipulative’ view of advertising. This book reveals a much more benign interpretation of advertising’s so-called ‘unconscious’ effects. In elaborating on some of the subtler mechanisms of advertising, it dispels many myths and exaggerated claims. At the same time it reveals just how subtle advertising’s influence can be and how much of an impact it can have on the success or failure of one brand over another.

This book will help advertising agencies to diagnose the why of what works, and what doesn’t. It shows advertisers how to get better results from their advertising budget and their agency. And it reveals to consumers how advertising works to influence which brands we choose—especially if the choice doesn’t matter to us personally—and why it is that we find it difficult to introspect on advertising’s effect.

1
INFLUENCING PEOPLE: MYTHS AND MECHANISMS

• Why do people buy bottled water that is available free from the tap?
• Why does advertising work on everybody else but not on us?
• Why do advertisers keep repeating an ad that we have already seen?

All these questions reflect the general belief that advertising works by persuading us, yet we don’t feel personally that we are at all persuaded by it.

Why is it so difficult for us to introspect on advertising and how it influences us? Because we look for major effects, that’s why! Too often, we look for the ability of a single ad to persuade us rather than for more subtle, minor effects. Big and immediate effects of advertising do occur when the advertiser has something new to say. Then it is easy for us to introspect on its effect.

But most effects of advertising fall well short of persuasion. These minor effects are not obvious but they are more characteristic of the way advertising works. To understand advertising we have to understand and measure these effects. When our kids are growing up we don’t notice their physical growth each day but from time to time we become aware that they have grown. Determining how much a child has grown in the last 24 hours is like evaluating the effect of being exposed to a single commercial. In both cases, the changes are too small for us to notice. But even small effects of advertising can influence which brand we choose, especially when all other factors are equal and when alternative brands are much the same.

Weighing the alternatives: evaluation

It is easiest to understand this with low-involvement buying situations. The situation is like a ‘beam balance’ in which each brand weighs the same. With one brand on each side, the scale is balanced. However, it takes only a feather added to one side of the balance to tip us in favor of the brand on that side. The brands consumers have to choose from are often very similar. Which one will the buying balance tip towards? When we look for advertising effects we are looking for feathers rather than heavy weights.¹

Figure 1.1: Low-involvement decision: deciding between two virtually identical alternatives.

The buying of cars, appliances, vacations and other high-priced items are examples of high-involvement decision-making. This high level of involvement contrasts with the low level brought to bear on the purchase of products like shampoo or soft drink or margarine. For most of us, the buying of these smaller items is no big deal. We have better things to do with our time than agonize over which brand to choose every time we buy something.

The fact is that in many low-involvement product categories, the alternative brands are extremely similar and in some cases almost identical. Most consumers don’t really care which one they buy and could substitute easily if their brand ceased to exist. It is in these low-involvement categories that the effects of advertising can be greatest and yet hardest to introspect upon.

Even with high-involvement products the beam balance analogy is relevant because very different alternatives can have equal weight. We often have to weigh up complex things like ‘average quality at a moderate price’ against ‘premium quality at a higher price’. Often we find ourselves in a state of indecision between the alternatives. When the choices weigh equally in our mind, whether they be low-involvement products or high-involvement products, it can take just a feather to swing that balance.²

Figure 1.2: High-involvement decision: very different alternatives can have equal weight.

With high-involvement decisions we are more concerned about the outcome of the weighing-up process, so we think more about how much weight to give to each feature (quality, size or power). How many extra dollars is it worth paying for a feature? Automotive writers for example can reach very different opinions. The more complex a product’s features the more complex this assessment because there are usually both positive and negative perspectives. For example, a compact car is positive in regard to both fuel economy and maneuverability but negative in regard to leg room and comfort.

So which way should we see it? What weight should we give to a particular feature in our minds? When advertising emphasizes points that favor a brand, it doesn’t have to persuade us—merely raise our awareness of the positive perspectives. Chances are we will notice confirmatory evidence more easily as a result. When we subsequently read a newspaper or consumer report or talk with friends, research shows that we are prone to interpret such information slightly more favorably.³ This effect is a long way from heavyweight persuasion. Rather it is a gentle, mental biasing of our subsequent perceptions, and we will see in Chapter 2 how perspective can influence our interpretation. It is not so much persuasion as a shifting of the mental spotlight… playing the focal beam of attention on one perspective rather than another.

Repetition

As with the am...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures and tables
• Acknowledgments
• About the author
• Part A Why Advertising has Remained a Mystery for so Long
• Part B What Works, What Doesn’t, and Why
• Appendix: How to prompt ad awareness
• Notes
• Index