Chapter I Introduction…
1.6 Research Procedure
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1.6 Research Procedure
Figure 1-2: Research Procedure
Establishing research goal and questions as the first steps of research procedure has been stated in Chapter I. Chapter II consists of previous studies overview and possibility of its application to the current study. Chapter III decides the research method, the author defines the universe of public sample, selects the advertising campaign and marking out reliable representative ads' sample. When the interviewing content is decided, recoded interviewing proceudres are conducted. In Chapter IV, the data is analyzed, and the results are discussed. Chapter V provides findings, conclusion, academic and practical suggestions, as well as points out the study limitations.
Selecting Ad Sample
Coding Print Ads
Marking out Representative Sample
Organize Recording
Analyzing the Data and Interpreting the Results Establishing Interviewing Content
Defining Sample Universe Establishing Research Goal
Previous Studies Overview Establishing Research Questions
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Chapter II Literature Review
2.1 Previous Study on Animals Issue in Advertising
Amazingly, previous studies have not examined the animal rights issue in
advertising in depth and only a few research papers have examined the use of animals in print ads.
Nancy Spears and Richard Germain in the research paper “A Note on Green Sentiments and the Human-Animal Relationship in Print Advertising During the 20th Century” (2007) used a content analysis of print advertisements with animals spanning the 20th century to investigate green sentiments. The provided framework integrates green advertisers’ depictions of animals and values. Thus, the present study seeks to contribute to the understanding of green sentiments in print ads having animals. The central purpose of the study was guided by three objectives:
To suggest how animals in Advertising can be used to reassure consumers;
To study changing social values;
To conduct a longitudinal examination of print ads.
To accomplish these objectives, the study proposes a theoretical model based on positionality. The concept of positionality refers to the culturally understood position that humans hold in relation to animals and how this position adapts to ever changing societal demands. Hypotheses were developed from the model to address artistic renditions of animals as well as the depicted self-focused versus society-focused values in print advertisements in different time periods. A content analysis of 1,223 magazine advertisements from the 20th century in the United States was conducted to test the hypotheses.
Findings of this study suggest the manner in which animals and depicted values in ads containing animals can be effectively used to stimulate the consumer to consider green value in advertised products.
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Advertisers frequently use animals in ads, another little academic research Lancendorfer, Atkin, and Reece (2008) focuses on consumer reactions to their use. This study uses the heuristic–systematic model (HSM) to examine consumer response to animal companions in advertisements. Specifically, HSM serves as the theoretical foundation for testing the effects of animal heuristic cues on the formation of attitude toward the ad, attitude toward the brand, and purchase intention. In the current study, the presence of the dog increases heuristic processing, concurrent processing, and ultimately attitude toward the ad.
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effectiveness content models are based on a well-known advertising theory presented by Lavidge and Steiner (1961) – the hierarchy of effects model (A Model for Predictive Measurements of Advertising Effectiveness, Journal of Marketing, October 1961):Awareness -> Knowledge -> Liking -> Preference -> Conviction -> Purchase Later on, many researchers developed similar models based on this theory. John D.
Leckenby and Nugent Wedding (1982) suggested three dimensions of impact in the persuasion process: Cognitive – Affective – Conative.
The cognitive (knowing) dimension includes attitude, exposure, awareness, recognition, comprehension, and recall.
The affective (feeling) dimension includes attitude change, liking/disliking, and involvement.
The conative (taking an action) dimension includes advertised intention and behavior.
Although these models provide useful insights into the possible sequence of audience responses to advertisements in general, they are a bit simplified for empirical research in advertising effects, because the human mind is much more complex than the three- or six-step procedures.
An early research in cognitive response theory is in attitude change research (Timothy C. Brock, 1967; Anthony G. Greenwald, 1968). This approach has become an increasingly viable explanation for a variety of empirical findings and theoretical perspectives. The cognitive response approach to persuasion emphasizes the thoughts that people have while exposed to persuasive messages.
Advertising persuasion research has identified numerous ways in which advertising can influence public opinion. In the viewpoint of William E. Baker and Richard. J. Lutz (1988), using a general situational contingency approach, the Relevance-Accessibility Model (RAM) can explain when different advertising effects will be most effective and persuasive (and most ineffective) in influencing public
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behavior. The RAM represents an assimilation of recent research in cognitive and social psychology, behavioral learning theory, and advertising theory, including research on how consumers process Advertising information, how information is stored in and accessed from memory, and how people use information to facilitate judgments.
The RAM is based on the view that the primary goal of Advertising is not to change an attitude at the moment of exposure to the advertisement, but rather to influence choice by communicating relevant information that is easily retrieved, that is, accessible, and used at the response occasion to discriminate among other alternatives.
According to the RAM, breakdowns in advertising effectiveness occur for two general reasons: when advertising information is not accessed at the response occasion or when the accessed advertising information is perceived as irrelevant to the choice process. To be optimally effective advertising messages must contain the type of information that public are most likely to use to discriminate at the response occasion and maximize the accessibility of that information at the response occasion. A central proposition of the RAM is that perceived information relevance is a function of public decision-making involvement at the response occasion.
Application of the Elaboration Likelihood Model of persuasion, or ELM (Petty and Cacioppo, 1986), and Heuristic-Systematic Model of Information Processing, or HSM (Chaiken, 1980), suggests a model of source effects. Depending on the level of involvement, persuasion may occur through either an effortful, systematic, elaboration‐based central route or an effortless association, or heuristic‐based peripheral route. The multiple‐roles postulate of the ELM (Petty and Wegener, 1998 and 1999) suggests that source effects may occur via either the peripheral route, if source serves as a peripheral cue, or the central route, if source serves as a product‐advocacy argument.
Hence, the multiple‐roles postulate, with source effects a result of consumers processing source information (e.g., thoughts and feelings evoked by the source), upholds multiple source‐effect hypotheses and may resolve the discrepancies between the source‐effect models described.
When cognitive resources are constrained (due to low motivation and/or low ability), consumers spend fewer resources processing information, by definition (i.e.,
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low‐resource processing). Source perceptions may influence product attitudes in multiple ways, such as category‐based responses (Fiske and Neuberg, 1990), well‐learned heuristics (Chaiken, 1980), cognitive balance (Heider, 1958), or associations (Petty and Cacioppo, 1986). Thus, if source features are affectively positive (e.g., attractive) or consistent with well‐practiced, positive judgment heuristics (e.g., “experts are believable”), positive source effects will likely result. Since low‐resource/low‐involvement consumers are unlikely to process source information further, resulting source effects are unlikely to depend on the product category.
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An important shift in advertising research occurred in the decade of the 1980s. The dominance of verbal measures of advertising response has given a way to a more balanced perspective that includes a concern for affective and behavioral responses to advertising stimuli, as well as verbal or cognitive responses. The use of imagery, visual associations, drawings and paintings, and models are pervasive in advertising. The importance of nonverbal communication is obvious. Among the elements that belong to nonverbal communication are pictures and illustrations, symbols, gestures and other
“affective” stimuli. Nonverbal communication is difficult to define. Researchers have attempted to develop various classification systems for this. Among the more frequently identified classes are: paralinguistic phenomena (how is something said or shown), facial expression, body movements (kinesics), gestures, spacing or proxemics, eye movements, touch, pictures (pictics or vidistics), and symbolic artifacts.
The study of nonverbal communication has a rich tradition in the social sciences.
The design Advertising research without consideration of nonverbal variables risks confounding and loss of internal validity. Advertising creative designers grapple with the problem of making the best use of nonverbal communication.
Julie Edell in “Nonverbal Effects in Ads: Review and Synthesis” (1988) provides a useful and quite comprehensive overview of the area. She provides four theoretical mechanisms for explaining the impact of nonverbal communication in advertising:
information processing, classical conditioning, distraction, and mood induction.
Numerousinformation processing research papers show that a picture is more likely to be remembered than words The explanation of this phenomena is that pictures can often show the relationship between the objects. Thus, the association between these objects is more meaningfully and effortlessly made, resulting in a stronger and more memorable message.
Under the classical conditioning mechanism, nonverbal elements of advertising have an effect by transferring the affect generated in response to the nonverbal elements to the advertised theme. The distraction explanation has often been found to be most consistent with the data, especially when stimuli used in the study closely resembled
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typical advertisements. In 1983, Johnson and Tversky conducted four experiments investigating the effects of mood states on people’s perception of risk. They found that a negative event (for example, street crime, chronic depression, stroke) regardless of how similar the mood-induction story was to the type of event effeted estimated of the frequency of a similar event occurring Both a depressing story and a crime story had the same effect on estimates of the frequency of all types of negative events occurring. The positive story decreased the estimate of twenty of twenty-one different types of negative events occurring. Johnson and Tversky concluded that the mood induced by these brief stories had large and pervasive impacts not only on similar events, but on wide range of unrelated events as well.
If nonverbal elements are successful in creating an affective reaction, mood, or feeling state, then this mood could influence other evaluations, including the evaluation of information, the Ad, and the advertised theme.
In studies of visual-verbal integration, one of the earliest investigations of visual stimuli in impression formation was reported by Lampel and Anderson (1968). Female college students evaluated the datability of males described by a photograph and two personality-trait adjectives. The result showed that the importance of verbal trait information increased as the visual attractiveness increased. But when visual information was presented in a verbal list, it was unimportant. That is, inherently visual information, such as physical appearance, is apparently discounted when it is described verbally. The visual material, when available, is processed first, and this sets the stage for later processing of verbal information. This means that visual information dominates initial impressions. This does not imply that the final impression is similarly dominated by pictures. Since additional information may be incorporated into the impressions, the final impact of picture depends on how much more besides the picture is processed.
There are three sources of evidence to support the assumption of visual priority.
First, analyses of eye movements indicate what people respond to first when viewing an ad. Second, Edell and Staelin proposed a processing model for advertising in which the first step is to “look at layout of ad” (1983, p.48). Using print ads, they employed a variety of responses, including process-tracing techniques, to measure the subject’s
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reaction. They found that different processing strategies were used depending on the relation between picture and text. All processing, however, began with the analysis of pictorial information.
The Consumer Integration Theory (CIT) presented by James Shanteau (1988) describes how visual and verbal information is combined to form of an impression. This theory is based on the two assumptions of visual primacy and serial averaging, which is substantial and direct. These assumptions lead to a five-step model: (1) the first reactions to visual stimuli, (2) the first reactions to verbal stimuli, (3) initial impressions based on combination of visual and verbal first reactions, (4) further processing to extract attribute values, and (5) updating of impressions as additional attributes are extracted.
This approach leads to several implications about the effects of visual information in advertising. First, CIT is predicated on pictorial materials having a primary role in the initial impressions to ads. The visual information may dominate the final impression or provide a starting point that is eclipsed by later text information.
Second, CIT implies that the relative importance of visual and verbal information in an Ad is a function of extent or subsequent processing.
Third, involvement with an ad is likely to play a major role in determining whether visual or verbal material is most influential. Under low involvement, visual information is more important than under high involvement, because it is processed first and there is a little subsequent processing of verbal information. Finally, the experience of consumers should also influence the relative impact of visual and verbal information.
Andrew A. Mitchell’s research concerns a number of issues examining the effects of feeling states in advertising (1985). The first issue is whether the effects of feeling states induced prior to the exposure to an advertisement are different from those induced by the advertisement itself. The second issue concerns the explanation of these effects by difference in the information encoded during exposure to the advertisement.
The third issue is whether the effects of these feeling states are similar to those induced by placing a positively or negatively evaluated photograph in an advertisement.
The results of this study found that mood had a strong effect on the formation of
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counterarguments generated and no effect on attitude toward the advertisement. There seemed to be little relationship between the valence of the information recalled from memory and the attitudes that were formed under the positive mood condition.Finally, the images characteristics of nonverbal communication in advertisement are an important part of the impulse for optimal processing of information in advertisements. Lynn R. Kahle and Pamela M. Homer consider surrealism as nonverbal communication in advertising (1986). According to present research, there is an immense use of surrealistic techniques in public service advertising. Surrealism, as a phenomenon of an early twentieth-century artistic movement, is often evident in cotemporary advertisements. The magnificent importance of this research is to consider the amount of creativity of surrealism in advertising that is needed in order to understand whether and how these techniques influence consumers.
Surrealism is a form of art that represents the unexpected combinations of vision suddenly free of the stereotyped mental habits. It seeks dialectically to deny opposites, such as seriousness and humor, or good and bad. Surrealists achieve maximum impact of an object through a variety of nonverbal communication techniques such as:
isolation – the object once situated outside its own field is freed of its expected role;
modification – the artist changes some aspect of the object so that a property that is not normally associated with the object is a associated with it; incongruity – a change in scale, position or substance; paradox – intellectual antitheses; conceptual bipolarity – interpenetrating images in which two situations observed from a single point of view;
provocation of accidental encounters and double images.
Social adaptation theory (Kahle and Homer) has been developed primarily to account for attitude change and advertising effectiveness. At the heart of any theory of consumer behavior is the central mechanism through which change occurs. The two building elements of change in social adaptation theory are assimilation and accommodation. When someone receives new information that information can be assimilated into existing mental schema, it can lead to accommodation (revision) of such a schema. Assimilation is the fusion of a new object to an already established
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schema. Accommodation is the most direct sense in which the environment acts on the individual’s cognitive structure. An unexpected or surreal stimulus will likely foster adaptation because it will not fit into any established schema.
A complementary function to adaptation is organization. It is the tendency to systematize process into coordinated, coherent systems. It is the mechanism through which internal representations of the external environment are related to one another.
Social adaptation theory predicts that employing surrealistic techniques should draw attention to the inadequacy of existing schemas, because the information will be perceived as novel and unexpected, which are the most important elements in a creativity theory of advertising.
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McCracken proposed a meaning transfer model for celebrity endorsement (1989).
According to the model, a celebrity’s effectiveness as an endorser stems from the cultural meanings with which the celebrity is endowed. The model shows how the meanings pass from the celebrity to the product and from the product to the consumer.
Meaning begins as something resident in the physical and social world constituted by the principles of the prevailing culture. Meaning then moves to consumer goods and to the consumer’s life. The movement of meanings from the culturally constituted world to consumer goods is achieved by advertising and the fashion system. The movement from consumer goods to the individual consumer is achieved by the efforts of the consumer.
Celebrity endorsement plays a crucial role in this transfer. The meaning first resides in the celebrities themselves, is then transferred when the celebrity enters an advertisement with a product, and finally is carried from the product to the consumer.
A previous research paper is quite useful for the present study (based on analyzing the effectiveness of print advertisements with participating famous models standing up for animals rights). Kahle and Homer (1985) examined how people respond to magazine advertising by manipulating the physical attractiveness of celebrity sources, and the likeability of celebrity sources. The study focused on how they participate in product involvement in simulated print advertisements for Edge disposable razors.
Celebrities with extreme ratings on physical attractiveness and likeability were selected for inclusion in the simulated advertisements, based on a preliminary survey of respondents from the same subject population as the participants in the actual experiment. Kahle and Homer reasoned that for products such as disposable razor, for which consumer interest is relatively low, subjects would not examine information from an advertisement very long. The same is true for PSA, public interest for animal protection actions is as that high as it could be for the any market product. Any information conveyed in the advertisement would probably be observed within the first second or two of observing the advertisement. Thus, the adapted significance of the celebrity’s image relative to the function of the advertised object would be crucial in
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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
Advertising uses appeals as a way of persuading the public. There are two basic