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

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

Note: Treat with extreme caution sources labelled with this symbol!

Key Module Links

Assignment Deadlines Archive of Student Essays for This Module MCS Archive of Student Essays
Semiotics for Beginners Assignment Feedback Form General Criteria for Assignments General Guidelines for Writing Essays


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