Assignment One
Illustrate and critically evaluate the psychological strategies typically used by advertisers to 'appeal' to consumers.
Guidance
For general guidance see the
guidelines for writing essays and reports.
What Key Features Do I Look For?
- Familiarity with relevant texts
- Evidence - the stronger the better
- Argument - coherent and balanced
- Theoretical discussion - relation to relevant theories
- Understanding of relevant concepts
- Reflexivity - reflections on methodology
- Examples - insightfully analysed
- Style - readability and effective presentation
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Please remember to avoid footnotes and to include an
alphabetical list of 'References' which have been cited in the text
(not a Bibliography of anything you have read for the essay). This list should include
author's names, date, book titles (in italics), place of publication and publisher.
Within the text always cite author's surname, date and page number. Double-space your
text and number your pages. For more detailed notes on writing essays in this
department, click
here.
For examples of essays by UWA students click
here.
Advice for this particular assignment: This is a wide-ranging question and so you need to
prioritise and note what you do not intend to cover. The main focus is on advertising
'appeals'. As a basis for discussing these
it would be reasonable to mention Abraham
Maslow's 'hierarchy of needs', though not uncritically. You may wish to mention the Elaboration
Likelihood model of persuasion and its relevance (see marketing and consumer behaviour textbooks).
If you do, you should mention high and low involvement
and content ('message') versus form.
The main argument here is that much processing of ads is
likely to be peripheral, operating on a drip-by-drip basis
rather than directly influencing the immediate
purchase of products (see, for instance, Sutherland 1993 and Shimp 2003). We may thus be right that we are rarely
influenced by single ads and the influence may be more on long-term brand awareness rather than short-term
purchasing behaviour. Do not uncritically adopt
the behaviourist perspective of classical conditioning, since this presents the consumer as essentially passive.
One way of dividing up your material would be into emotional and rational appeals (do different product sectors
tend to employ one rather than the other?).
I suggest that you include appeals to fears and guilt. Mention what is known about how effective such appeals are.
Sex and humour are covered in assignments in the second batch, so leave those aside here unless you
do not intend to tackle those questions later. In which product sectors (low or high involvement?) are which appeals more
frequent? How is the appeal related to the target group (do not spend too much space on target group since there are
separate assignments for this). Choose some examples from print and some from TV.
One approach might be to list some of the 'rules' offered by practitioners in the agencies and check whether
these seem to reflect current research findings. You may find my
framework of appeals of some use. Do not fall into the trap of taking 'subliminal advertising' seriously: there is
a separate question on this mythology in batch two so don't try to cover it here. The current question
does not refer directly to strategies used to gain attention and you should not devote space to this here either.
Therefore, you would not include a discussion of such things as 'shock tactics' used to gain attention.
Note that this is an assignment for which the
inclusion of relevant pictorial illustrations is likely to be an advantage.
Some suggested reading
- Acuff, Dan (1997)
What Kids Buy and Why: The Psychology of Marketing to Kids. New York: Free Press
- Barnard, Malcolm (1995) 'Advertising: The Rhetorical Imperative', in Chris Jencks (Ed) (1995)
Visual Culture. London: Routledge, pp. 26-41
- Beasley, Ron & Marcel Danesi (2002)
Persuasive Signs: The Semiotics of Advertising. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter
- Brierley, Sean (2001)
The Advertising Handbook. London: Routledge (Chapter 3)
- Clark, Eric (1988)
The Wantmakers. London: Hodder & Stoughton (Chapter 5)
- Condry, John (1989)
The Psychology of Television. New Jersey: Erlbaum
- Cook, Guy (1992)
The Discourse of Advertising. London: Routledge
- Corrigan, Peter (1997)
The Sociology of Consumption. London: Sage (Chapter 5)
- Del Vecchio, Gene (1997)
Creating Ever-Cool: A Marketer's Guide to a Kid's Heart. Gretna: Pelican
- Dyer, Gillian (1982)
Advertising as Communication. London: Methuen
- Fowles, Jib (1996)
Advertising and Popular Culture Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
- Foxall, Gordon (1990)
Consumer Psychology in Behavioural Perspective. London: Routledge
- Gunter, Barrie & Adrian Furnham (1992)
Consumer Profiles: An Introduction to Psychographics. London: Routledge
- Heath, Robert (2012)
Seducing the Unconscious: The Psychology of Emotional Influence in Advertising. Chichester: Wiley
- Hecker, Sidney & David W Stewart (Eds) (1988)
Nonverbal Communication in Advertising. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books/D C Heath
- Hine, Thomas (1995)
The Total Package: The Secret History and Hidden Meanings of Boxes, Bottles, Cans and Other Persuasive Containers. Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Co
- Jhally, Sut (1987)
The Codes of Advertising. New York: St. Martin's Press (Chapters 2 & 5)
- Leiss, William, Stephen Kline & Sut Jhally (2005)
Social Communication in Advertising. London: Routledge
- Lewis, David & Darren Bridger (2000)
The Soul of the New Consumer: Authenticity: What we Buy and Why in the New Economy. London: Nicholas Brealey
- Mann, Darrell (2005)
'Disruptive Advertising: TRIZ And The Advertisement'
[WWW document] URL
http://www.triz-journal.com/archives/2002/10/g/index.htm
- Messaris, Paul (1997)
Visual Persuasion: The Role of Images in Advertising. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
- O'Shaughnessy, John & Nicholas Jackson O'Shaughnessy (2004)
Persuasion in Advertising. London: Routledge
- Packard, Vance (1962)
The Hidden Persuaders. Harmondsworth: Penguin
- Popcorn, Faith and Lys Marigold (2001)
Eve-olution: The 8 Truths of Marketing to Women. London: HarperCollins
- Scott, Linda M & Rajeev Batra (Eds) (2003)
Persuasive Imagery: A Consumer Response Perspective. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum
- Sobieszek, Robert A (1988)
The Art of Persuasion: A History of Advertising Photography. New York: Abrams
- Solomon, Michael R. (2004)
Consumer Behavior: Buying, Having and Being (6th edn.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education International
- Sutherland, Max (1993)
Advertising and the Mind of the Consumer: What Works, What Doesn't and Why. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin
- Underhill, Paco (1999)
Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping. New York: Simon & Schuster
- Vestergaard, Torben & Kim Schrøder (1985)
The Language of Advertising. Oxford: Basil Blackwell
- Weiss, Michael J. (2000)
The Clustered World: How We Live, What We Buy and What It All Means About Who We Are. Boston, MA: Little, Brown
- Wernick, Andrew (1991)
Promotional Culture: Advertising, Ideology and Symbolic Expression. London: Sage (Chapter 2)
- Witkoski, Michael (2003) 'The Bottle That Isn't There and The Duck That Can't be Heard: The "Subjective Correlative" in
Commercial Messages' Studies in Media & Information Literacy Education 3(3) [WWW document] URL
http://www.utpjournals.com/simile/issue11/witkoskifulltext.html
- Zaltman, Gerald (2003)
How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press
Note: Treat with extreme caution sources labelled with this symbol!
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