Effective Advertising - Essay Example

Effective Advertising In many boardrooms advertising is seen as a cost rather than an investment. It is essential though that advertising is treatedwith the same level of accountability as other business functions. Advertising expenditure can demonstrably generate a return on investment, by measuring sales growth, market share, brand equity and awareness. It is critical to evaluate the advertising message to see if it is communicating the intended strategy. The advertisement should ensure that the consumer can clearly understand the proposition - whether the proposition is based on functional or emotional benefits, how credible are the claims, and how it will impact sales. In current study I will critically discuss the techniques that make the advertisement an effective addition to corporate marketing strategy; the on that promotes the product on the market; encourages the production growth and lead to a positive balance ratio. There are many ways to make an advertisement effective. I will provide three dimensions of an advertisement further: 1. the rational or logical reasons for purchase 2. the mnemonic or memory aspects of the message (which explains things like the 50 year retention of the Reingold jingle cited earlier) 3. the emotional or motivational reasons for purchase (the unconscious side) Although marketers and creative directors may be thoroughly familiar with the rational approach and may have learned much about mnemonics and long-term memory, many are still in the dark regarding the unconscious side and motivation. What is presented here is the integration of all three aspects of advertising, leading to a totally integrated three-dimensional approach to advertising and marketing. It is imperative to examine three-dimensional advertising and marketing in detail, especially with reference to the second dimension: motivation. The First Dimension of Advertising and Marketing: Logic, Rationalizations, and Justifications Logic and rationalization are the first dimension of advertising and the one that is the most familiar. They also are the most exploited dimension in advertising. That is because most marketing approaches are based upon traditional market research, and traditional market research asks people logical questions. Hence, consumers respond accordingly: with logic and the left side of their brain. Since humans want to appear logical and rational, they give logical and rational answers. They respond not only to other people, but also to themselves. Typical of the answers and rationalizations that are given are: "I bought it because I'll never see it at that price again." "When these are all gone, there won't be any more." "These coupons cut the price nearly in half." "I really needed it." "The salesman offered me a deal I couldn't resist." "I bank at First because it's so convenient." "I like the people at the Apple Tree Restaurant; they're friendly and go out of their way to please." "Even though I have a two-hour commute to the city, the taxes are much lower out here." These are rationalizations. They may be true or untrue. They are what the consumer wants to believe, and they are what the consumer wants others to believe. Rationalizations are the most common form of advertising. They work either on the front end or as reinforcers, after the decision has been made. Rationalizations influence the emotions. They are obvious, and they are powerful. They are motivating. The problem is that at some point before the sale is made the consumer has to deal with emotion. Also, rationalizations do not feed into brand loyalty, positioning, unique selling, and marketing propositions. That is why people buy ABC instead of XYZ, and what has to be done to change them. Consumer decisions are based primarily on emotion and not reason. Even so, rationalizations are an important part of the purchasing process. Kowata and Buck ( 1995) illustrate the relationship between rationalizations and emotions (affect) in a cross-cultural study. According to these investigators, all products and services (including business-to-business) involve emotion. There are no choices in the marketplace that are unemotional. As we move from the left side to the right side of the product continuum illustrated below, affect remains stable as rational thinking becomes more important. An example of a product or activity at the left side of the scale would be the Elvis Presley phenomenon. An example on the right side would be the choice of a broker or a subcontractor on a solid rocket fuel project. These investigators, using the CASC Scale, compared several products in both India and the United States and showed that there was a very close relationship between the ratio of emotion and reason in them. Ibis would suggest that the hypothesis of the relationship between emotion and reason in certain products holds up cross-culturally. The Second Dimension of Advertising and Marketing: Memory How is advertising made memorable In the past memorability in advertising has been carried out through suggestions, repetition, and jingles. Music and artwork access the right brain very effectively. Today, however, there is too much competition, visual and musical, for the attention of the right brain. It may be referred to as clutter. Also, repetition is expensive. But there are other new methods. Suggestions are brief (three to five word) declaratory statements, usually worded in a positive direction. An example of a suggestion is "It's the real thing." A suggestion does not have to be logical or based on fact. It is a simple statement. It is not complex and logical, since the unconscious mind--which does not process logical and rational thinking--reacts to simple, positively worded suggestions. Suggestions should not be negatively worded--for example, "don't smoke cigarettes"--because the Silent Side, the right brain, is unable to process reverse logic. Negatives involve logic, since they are the reversal of positives, and the right brain does not deal in logic. Suggestions should always be worded in a positive direction. Another way in which advertising is made memorable is through repetition. Repetition is intimately bound up with suggestions, because suggestions need to be given on a repetitive basis, over and over again. Simple suggestions, like "We try harder" or "It's the real thing" or "Gimme a Lite" or "Hello, Federal," do not have much of a chance of penetrating a consumer's unconscious mind unless they are repeated over and over again. But repetition is very expensive, and it creates even more clutter in the marketplace. The fact is that most marketers do not have the budget for the kind of repetition that it would take to make an impact. Repetition is too expensive. But there is another way to create memorable advertising that gets around the requirement and the expense of repetition. This alternative is more exciting because of the possibilities that it presents. It is based upon the fact that the right brain thinks in pictures, not words! Medical students have known this for years. Unlike law school or other graduate schools, medical school requires the commitment to memory--much of it to short-term memory--the names of hundreds of organs, procedures, facts, lists, muscles, bones, etc. Medical students quickly become familiar with mnemonics, or methods of converting the subject matter from verbal to visual. It works because everybody has a photographic memory. Most people do not use their photographic memories, but everyone has one. The most well known mnemonic that is used in medical school is "On old Olympus' towering top a fat aging Greek poured some hops." Ibis mnemonic, which paints a rather unusual or even absurd picture in the mind, serves as a reminder of the 12 cranial nerves: olfactory, optic, oculi, trochear, trifacial, abducent, facial, auditory, glosso-pharyngeal, pneumogastric, spinal accessory, and hypoglossal. The chances that all of this will be recalled at the crucial time--on a test--improves 200 percent with the mnemonic picture of the fat, old Greek pouring hops. Advertising recall improves when messages are visual, not just verbal. As stated above, this is true because the right brain thinks in pictures, not words. However, television has created a situation where there is visual clutter, so the problem that marketers face is to make the visuals stand out from the clutter. Advertising can be made memorable when the medium of absurdities is introduced. Absurdities will be examined in chapter 5. They are the key to the second dimension of three-dimensional advertising: memorability and recall. The Third Dimension of Advertising and Marketing: Emotion Consumers cannot tell you about their own motivation. They cannot tell you why they do what they do. In fact, motivation is the most puzzling subject in all human behavior. Why do people smoke, take drugs, continue to fail over and over again, or commit crimes when they know that they will be punished Conversely, why do people succeed, become great leaders, or dedicate their lives unselfishly to others The whole area of human motivation, the why of human behavior seems to be clothed in secrecy. Not only are consumers unable to explain why they do what they do, but the psychologists and the psychiatrists who study human behavior have been at a loss to explain many facets of behavior. So just how does an approach to the unconscious mind differ About 20 years ago we were treating patients in a clinical setting. These patients had serious problems. To resolve these problems it was necessary to go into the past, sometimes into childhood, to find out what the causes were so that the cure could be worked out and be effective. But most people could not remember the things that happened to them in childhood. We began using visualization. In other words, instead of addressing the left brain we addressed the right brain, because the right brain "thinks" in pictures. In doing this, we found the reasons behind problems that patients presented that had happened many years before, often in childhood. Incest, abuse, abandonment, surgical trauma, all of these things that had been covered up (repressed) by the left brain began to come up out of the unconscious or Silent Side with the assistance of the right brain and visualization. There was nothing complicated about these clinical interventions. People were simply told to close their eyes and visualize what may have been happening to them under certain circumstances. Unlike the use of hypnosis, sodium amytal, sodium pentothal, or other accepted but complicated procedures, visualization is very simple. The patients close their eyes and make pictures in their minds. Instead of trying to describe what they think happened or what they remember, they simply describe what they see. This method has also been used for the recovery of evidence at a crime scene or in other situations where remote memory must be accessed. About five years later, this same technique were applied to consumers. Individuals were recruited and, using trained clinical interviewers, were asked to close their eyes and visualize experiences: their first roller coaster ride; their first new automobile; a trip to the supermarket; a memorable fine-dining experience; the first time they saw Elvis; a trip to a banking institution; a time when they learned to water ski, etc. What emerged from these in-depth interviews with consumers was a lot of rational and logical information (which was expected) but also, over time, a significant amount of emotional and motivational information that was vital to brand choice, brand loyalty, positioning, increasing market share, etc. Of course the interviewers had to be trained. They had to know what approach to use. The interviews were often quite lengthy. But since there are only 11 basic motives involved in the unconscious mind, it became acceptable to use very small samples to get this information. This marketing-to-the-mind approach is different because it deals with the actual causes and motives that drive consumers to do what they do and make the choices that they make in the marketplace. Motivation has been a very mysterious and mystical issue. Behavioral scientists, from whom we might expect to get assistance, have not really been that helpful. Creative directors have done their own thing and have been more on target than anyone, but the creative approach is based upon trial and error. What marketing to the mind offers is a system, a methodology and strategy that puts the marketer and creative director on target every time. Ibis is the third dimension of advertising: motivation and emotion. More specifically, the emotion that grows out of motivation. Emotion and motivation are what advertising and marketing are all about. Most consumer decisions are based upon emotion, not reason. Consumers cannot tell you why they do what they do. What they can tell you is either why they think they do what they do or what they would like you to hear. Both of these kinds of answers are from the left side of the brain. Marketing to the mind goes beyond all of this and looks into the right brain responses and motives. Motives are not things that consumers ordinarily think about--but they are significant in motivating them to make the choices that they make. Positioning is also a way to effective advertisement. Reis and Trout ( 1981) in their classic, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, define positioning as an approach to advertising that basically ties a new product or concept to another that already exists in the marketplace--it reties "connections that already exist within the mind." They further assert that, because of marketing clutter, the old strategies are not working like they used to. There are too many products, too many companies, and too many methods of getting the message across. Positioning is a classical "short cut" to getting the message into the mind. But in order to do that, there must be a road map or some kind of taxonomy of the mind. Reis and Trout have observed that marketers cannot just keep coming up with new creative strategies year after year and that many of the old methods do not work. Marketing to the mind allows the marketer to look, for the first time, at the unconscious mind to uncover basic motivations and then to address them directly. When motives are uncovered, marketing and advertising strategies become very, very clear. A significant difference between positioning and marketing to the mind is that positioning relies on strategies that are external-that is, outside of the consumer, as in tying two products together. Marketing to the mind deals with what is inside the consumer, and then, through research, shows how to address it effectively by tying it directly to human motive and emotion. Marketing to the mind is not necessarily a better technique than positioning; it is simply a complementary addition. It is where creative and marketing directors have been looking all along; they just have not had a road map to the unconscious, or emotional side. The two approaches--positioning and marketing to the mind--complement one another. Beside all the factors that play an important role to the advertisement, the colour of an advertising banner means a lot as well. Color has, for many years, been recognized by marketers as having a crucial role in emotion. Psychologists have also recognized this, and color plays a major role in psychological testing. In some tests that are used for personality assessment, the subject's response to color is a strong indicator of how he/she handles his/her own as well as other people's emotions and emotional situations. When it comes to effective advertisement bright colors should take lace as they usually associate with glitz, sparkle, glitter, twinkle, and glow. Golds, silvers, and yellows are part of the advertising approach for the gaming industry, for instance. Inside the casinos colors play a secondary role to the glimmer and glitz of the signs, slots, mirrors, etc. All this is done for purposes of disorientating the customer (OR: Person, Place, Time, and Circumstances), and it is very effective.Further research needs to be carried out on how color is associated with the motives on the Silent Side. In sum, the three-dimensional approach-Rationalization Memory Motivation described in this paper-is the cornerstone to effective advertising and marketing. It deals with the whole or entire person, including intelligence, emotions, motives, feelings, logic. It does not try to slice off or isolate the person or use approaches that often end up insulting the consumer's intelligence or missing out on motivation.Ad copy, marketing strategies, and other persuasive attempts are aimed directly at consumer motivations, causing them to act. Three - dimensional marketing complements rational, logical thinking and accommodates it, rather than offering it as an alternative. In the unconscious, there is only one marketing strategy: personalization. Ibis strategy works at all demographic levels and knows no language or cultural barriers. Personalizations can be combined with rationalizations, with mnemonics, with absurdities, or they can be used alone. When personalizations are used, motivation is aroused and memory is enhanced, as long as the personalizations am product related Bibliography: 1. Albert W. W., Feinstein B., & Libet B. ( 1967). 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