Chapter II Literature Review
2.5 Advertising Appeal
國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
determining the effectiveness of the advertisement. The results of this study were consistent with the prediction. Only advertisements that included attractive celebrities were associated with optimal levels of favorable attitudes toward the product.
2.5 Advertising Appeal
Advertising uses appeals as a way of persuading the public. There are two basic appeals – emotional and rational. An emotional appeal is related to an individual’s psychological and social needs for purchasing certain products and services. Many consumers are emotionally motivated (or driven to make a purchase) and when evaluating a certain persuader’s message are influenced by the affects. Emotions, needs and values as belief systems and social constructions, guide the audience, play role in identifying persuader’s ideas and motivate the audience to act on persuader’s message (Averill, 1986; Borchers, 2001).
Rational appeals (as the name suggests) focus on the individual’s functional, utilitarian or practical needs for particular products and services. Such appeals emphasize the characteristics and features of the product and the service. Print media is particularly well suited for rational appeals and is often used with good success. As emotional appeal is drawn on motivations, rational appeal is about reasoning.
Traditionally, reasoning has been examined from a formal argumentation perspective.
Reasoning is concerned with making claims, which are the statements that communicate a persuader’s message to an audience. Michael G. Cruz (1988) found that when persuaders state their claims explicitly, audience members better comprehend their message. When they understand the message, the audience believes the persuader holds a more knowledgeable position on the subject, which Cruz argues, leads to greater attitude change. However, there must be some data, premises, evidences, or examples involved in reasoning process.
Next, the literature review highlights the different types of emotional appeal thatare widely used in PETA’s print PSA.
‧
“Publicity is about social relations, not objects. Its promise is not of pleasure, but of happiness as judged from outside by others. The happiness of being envied is glamour”
(Berger, 1972, p.132). “The women in advertising is meant to imagine herself transformed into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself” (Berger, p.134).
Sex and nudity have always sold well. Sexuality, sexual explicitness, overt sexuality, or sensuality raises the curiosity of the audience and can result in strong feelings about the advertisement. It can also result in the product appearing interesting.
Since the late 1960s, the use of sex in advertising has been widely discussed by scholars, activists, and the public (Reichert and Lambiase, 2006). Seminal studies analyzed the effects of nudity in print advertisements: who among viewers responded to the sexual appeal and how the appeal affected brand recall and viewer attitudes toward the brand (Alexander and Judd, 1978; Steadman, 1969). In comparative analyses of sexual portrayals in magazine advertisements in 1964 and 1984, Soley and Kurzbard found that while the percentage of sexual appeals did not increase, the types of sexual portrayals did, with the sexual appeal becoming more overt (Reichert and Lambiase).
Concerning model gender and product interactions, Thomas W. Whipple and Alice E. Courtney (1983) believe that although there is considerable evidence that advertising presents a traditionally stereotyped portrayal of women, and that demography and attitudes among women have changed dramatically over the past decade, there is a little agreement about what steps an advertiser can effectively take to respond to these challenges. Among some advertisers, there is concern that traditional stereotypes may be declining in the effectiveness. For some special cases and for some target audiences, who public service advertisers normally deal with, there are strong indications that progressive portrayals of women are more effective. There is also evidence that replacing traditional images with more modern or “liberated” ones may create new effectiveness. Becoming an object of desire supposedly makes a woman more valuable in the eyes of others, and hence more valuable to herself.
Aside from simply containing sexual content, sexual information in ads can be
‧
integrated within the message to greater or lesser degrees. Tom Reichert in his “What is sex in advertising?” (1993) describes the types of sexual content identified in advertising research, those are: nudity or dress, sexual behavior, physical attractiveness, sexual referents and sexual embeds.
John Berger (1972) presents an interpretation of advertising and the construction of envy, giving an interesting point of view: the image of women in advertising makes the viewer envious of his or her own potential self (what that person might be if they were in possession of the particular object, service or ideology presented in the advertisement). The ad’s presentation method incorporates an elitist appeal to glamour.
The fetishized women art object is evidently worth admiring. Here the female model takes on a complex dialectic of desire and power.
John Berger provides an interesting point of view about female nudity. According to Kenneth Clark (as cited in Berger, 1972), he distinguishes the definition of “nudity” and
“being naked”. “Being naked” is simply being without clothes, being one self, while the nude is a form of art, which means to be seen naked by others and not to be recognized for one self. The nude has to be seen as an object in the order to be a nude.
Women are not naked as they are, they are naked as you see them. Traditionally being naked punishes women, but at the same time she is admirable to others by being nude.
Another way of addressing a woman’s depiction is that she is placed on pedestal.
Such a presentation clearly makes her vulnerable – she becomes not simply an art object but also an object of consumption, an object of social influence. Her desirability and social power to command attention are contingent upon occupying this position.
Her image is elevated above the public where she commands its attention. In advertising, this commodification of appearance is endorsed as the route to control, power, strength and success.
The advertisements speak precisely to public imagination: by turning herself into a glamorous object of envy and desire, a women has power and influence. Just as in a daily life, a woman is observed by males and other women, which means that women are evaluated. The ability to survey is based on power, but here the female look confers power. Woman’s power over man and the possibility to make other women envy her is
‧
國立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
thus ironically depicted as a function of her willing acceptance of her vulnerability and powerlessness. Here is the unevident and very natural source to a woman’s persuasive power. Here, the woman as a paragon of beauty commands the public attention by making herself as an object of desire and envy. The public trusts this kind of source credibility. By emphasizing the fetishized self as the conduit to power and control, the ad obscures the fact that feelings of control gained through impression management are literally purchased at the cost of self-alienation. Obviously, sexual availability serves both as attention-getter and deal-maker, and this dialectic is as old as the human race.
For decades, a pervasive theme in advertising aimed at women has been the notion of woman as capital. Once the exclusive domain of men, capital has now been extended to women through the sphere of consumption. The principle works like this: the individual has a right to all that is accrued by virtue of her proprietary relationship of her body. Her appearance is her value and accordingly the value of ad (Goldman, 1949).
2.5.2 Humor Advertising Appeal
Advertisers frequently use humor to communicate with their audience. Humor can be an excellent tool to catch the viewer’s attention and help in achieving instant recall, when it is related to some benefit that the customer can derive. If it isn’t the joke might overpower the message. Findings regarding humor effects are largely inconclusive.
Alden, Mukherjee, and Hoyer (2000) explained that the quality of humor depends on the degree to which humor differs from viewers’ expected beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. As consumers’ expectations are largely shaped and guided by their cultural environments (Furrer, Liu, and Sudharshan, 2000; McCracken, 1986; Zhang and Gelb, 1996), it’s important to understand the requirements present in the cultural construct. In Western free-market economies, advertising is seen as a means by which goods and services are offered for sale and consumers become aware of their choices in the marketplace. In the formerly communist countries, commercial advertising has in the past been largely dismissed by the state as a capitalist tool, and the very notion of advertising through mass media was largely foreign (Reardon et al. 2005). The
‧
國立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
individual-centered, often hedonistic nature of advertisements made them incompatible with the values of socialist or communist societies, where more collectivist values were promoted (Lepkowska-White, 2004). State-sponsored social messages are often perceived as propaganda, and hence, are not taken as credible or relevant.
Thus, in PETA’s print characteristic, the viewer can see sex humor appeal, which seems only to be appropriate in a western context. In Freud’s 1928 work titled “Humor”, the term refers to a series of painful emotions transformed in a manner that produces pleasure. He argues that humor is the “most self-sufficient of the comic forms”. Duncan (1979) provided a list of general behavioral explanations: (1) humor as a distraction (from counterargumentation), (2) humor as a reward (operant conditioning), (3) humor as a positive stimulus paired with a sales proposition (classical conditioning), (4) humor as a creator of a positive/arousing reception environment (environmental psychology), and (5) humor as a creator of source credibility or likeability (source effects). Taking a broader perspective, Speck (1987) suggests that humor is a multidimensional phenomenon made up of distinct species.
Sharpe has specified theories of humor into three wide categories (2006):
cognitive-perceptual (including incongruity theories); superiority (affective-evaluative theories); relief (including psychodynamic theories). Descriptive integration of the three main strands of humor theory, that are often codependent on one another is termed “the challenge” model. Challenge is the common element in each theory; Superiority, or aggressive humor is one way to generate the challenge. There is considerable agreement that arousal, surprise, and play signals are important to establishing humorous situation.
The relief category includes finding safe solution from humorous and confusing situation. Although after finding the solution once, the viewer might easily lose interest and would not necessarily have a response or take the information seriously.
‧
persuasion (Gelb, Hong, and Zinkhan, 1985). Thus, Drive Explanation Model is based on the premise that the fear, which is aroused by the persuasive message, creates a state of drive that is unpleasant to receiver (Boster and Mongeau, 1984). This theory claims that the receiver will change his or her attitudes and behaviors as a means of drive reduction. On the other hand, the Resistance Explanation Model includes resistance to the message with the strong fear appeal.Leventhal, M. A. Safer, and D. M. Panagis (1983) claim two types of factors may reduce the effectiveness of a fear-arousing message. First, the fear may be associated with different components of the message and therefore may direct behavior in unexpected ways. Second, the fear may arouse feelings of hopelessness or feelings that one cannot cope with the threat.
Janis and Feshbach (1953) note that the receiver of a fear-arousing message may resort to defensive mechanisms and this could give rise to highly undesirable effects.
Mechanisms include resistance to the message (evasiveness, mishearings, etc.), hostility (defiance, contempt, etc.), and avoidance (as cited in Agres, Edell and Dubitsky, 1990).
G. R. Miller claims (1963) that a “strong fear appeal is not effective in producing audience response, but this conclusion is tempered by personality differences among audience members, the relevance and interest value of the communication for the audience and other relevant factors that affect the relationship” (p.122).
Paul A. Mongeau (1998) performed a meta-analysis of previous studies of fear appeal. He found that adding additional fear appeals to a persuasive message is likely to make the message more persuasive. He writes: “Specifically, no evidence exists that generating extremely strong levels of fear produces defensive avoidance processes and corresponding decrease in persuasion” (p.64). For nearly all audiences, the impact of fear appeal is likely to be positive. Fear appeals exert stronger influence on low-anxiety
‧
國立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
audience members than on high-anxiety audience members. Mongeau (1998) explains that this is due to high-anxiety audience members’ inability to cognitively process the solutions recommended by the fear appeal. In addition, fear has a stronger persuasive appeal on older audiences than on younger audiences. Mongeau explains that this may be because many fear appeals, such as those concerning health issues, are more relevant to older audiences.
Mongeau (1998) reaffirms support for the critical components of a fear appeal.
First, the fear appeal must develop the noxiousness or severity of the threat. The audience must feel that the threat, if it occurred, would be harmful. Second, the appeal must prove the probability of the threat’s occurring. Third, the appeal must show efficacy of the recommended coping response and that the audience member can enact a solution.