Marketing Communication: Effective Strategies

Marketing Communication - Full RUG summary

Week 1 Lecture 1: Effective marketing communication: a game of hurdles

• Individual perspective involves the prediction of how ad variables impact individual consumer responses and understanding the processes behind ad impact.
• Ad variables should be a focus, including source variables (expertise, credibility, attractiveness, number, and fame of the ad source).
• Message variables should be taken into account, such as argument quality, quantity, information density, and internal/external pacing.
• Cognitive responses involve beliefs, evaluations, inferences, convictions, awareness, attitudes, and preferences.
• Affective responses involve emotions and moods, whether transient or enduring, and positively or negatively valenced.
• Behavioral responses deal with actions toward the ad or brand, which include trial vs. habit, buying, using, and disposing.
• Various response types influence each other.
• Consumers are exposed to a multitude of commercial stimuli daily which can potentially create responses.
• Paid or unpaid communication by an identified sponsor is advertising and aims to inform and persuade target audiences about an organization, product, service, or idea.
• Argument-based appeals mostly affect thinking and cognitive responses, while emotional-based appeals mostly affect feelings and affective responses.

Two key functions of advertising

• Advertising informs by changing non-evaluative consumer responses (beliefs, knowledge) and persuades by changing evaluative consumer responses (attitude, preferences).
• Both argument-based and emotional appeals can inform and/or persuade.
• Alpha strategies promote an approach motivation by making the offer more attractive and Omega strategies reduce an avoidance motivation by reducing resistance.

Hurdle #1: How consumers acquire and process information from advertising

• The four basic stages of acquiring and processing information are preattentive analysis, focal attention, comprehension, and elaborative reasoning.
• These stages range from low, unconscious effort to high, conscious deliberation.
• Involvement is a feature of the consumer not of the product and is high when interest in the product is great and personally relevant.
• Preattentive analysis involves general, non-goal-directed surveillance of the environment that includes incidental exposure to advertising.
• Hemispheric lateralization affects how ads are processed: the left hemisphere is for text processing and the right hemisphere is for picture processing.
• It is beneficial if a pictorial ad benefits from being processed by the right hemisphere, so place it left.
• The left visual field feeds the right hemisphere, and the right visual field feeds the left hemisphere.
• Focal attention is the process by which information is brought into short-term, working memory, where it becomes the object of conscious attention.
• Voluntary attention is when a consumer decides what to look at and process, while involuntary attention occurs when the consumer starts having attention for things beyond his or her will.
• Salience (experienced contrast), vividness (emotionally interesting), and novelty (newness) promote involuntary focal attention.
• A two-sided ad is when there are not only positive factors, but also negative bits of information about the product/brand.
• Comprehension involves making sense of what is noticed and starts with believing or not believing incoming information and the first gut response is to believe new information.
• Elaborative reasoning is when advertising is fully conscious and involves linking what was learned to what is already known to create new ideas, beliefs, or attitudes, and it is a rare phenomenon.

Summary/conclusions

• Advertising effectiveness depends on the interaction of person variables and ad variables.
• Conscious and unconscious processes both play important roles in advertising effectiveness.

Chapter 1: Setting the stage

• Advertising is any paid or non-paid communication by an identified or non-identified sponsor aimed to inform and/or persuade target audiences about an organization, product, service or idea.
• Outdoor advertising was the first type of advertising which reaches consumers when they are outside their homes using clay tablets, placards, handbills, and poster bills.
• The Industrial Revolution boosted advertising by necessitating informing consumers of the availability of goods and services due to large-scale division of labor.
• The brand is the label to identify an individual product and distinguish it from competition.
• A unique selling proposition is a summary statement to meaningfully differentiate a brand from the competition and must be unique advantages not shared by competitors.
• Newspapers and magazines continue to be a popular advertising medium.
• Consumer segments share features targeted by manufacturers and advertisers using product and ad accommodations on those levels.
• The internet will continue to coexist next to more traditional mass media, but it will not eliminate them.
• An information/argument-based appeal uses factual information on product attributes and availability to inform and persuade consumers.
• This appeal informs the consumer straightforwardly what was for sale, at what price, and where could one buy it.
• Hard-sell appeal is an aggressive approach while the emotional/affect based appeal aims to influence the consumer's feelings and emotions.
• Hard-sell and soft-sell appeals still coexist and reflect the ad agencies about what works in advertising.

Advertising in practice: the nuts and bolts of the industry

• Ad campaigns are started to promote the firm's brand.
• The building blocks for the ad agency are in a briefing, such as what the campaign needs to accomplish and the budget.
• Market research, campaign concepts, main message, and media planning may be conducted if needed.
• The concepts need to be approved by the client firm.
• A concept test is used, which takes the form of qualitative research and consists of a description of the main message and a few prototypes.
• Aims of the concept tests are whether the campaign will be able to attain the set objectives and what drivers and barriers the participants may identify.
• Pretest can be conducted as a disaster check to identify the potential of attaining the set objectives or whether they may backfire.
• Pretest signals are used to implement the campaign.
• The campaign is evaluated to see if the objectives have been reached.
• Advertising does have its place in society, both at an aggregate and an individual level.
• Sponsorship is a technique where a commercial organization financially supports another entity to associate the organization's name and use that entity for advertising.
• A function of advertising is to facilitate competition by enabling firms to communicate efficiently with consumers in the competition between firms.
• Attention is the process by which information is held in conscious awareness which relates evaluative judgments of one object in comparison to others.
• Advertising informs consumers about new and existing products and funds a mass media.
• Emphasis is placed on creating or influencing non-evaluative consumer responses relating to knowledge or beliefs.
• Beliefs are the opinion, knowledge, or thoughts someone has about an attitude object and often form of the basis of evaluative judgements or preferences.
• Persuade to generate or change an evaluative response to view the advertised brand as favorable.
• Product life cycle illustrates diffusion of a product across the marketplace.
• When a product enters the market, advertisers must create brand awareness: the ease with which exposure triggers the brand image
• During the growth stage, focus is on building market share by improving the product and extensions.
• In the maturity stage, the focus shifts to creating consumer brand loyalty and awareness.
• In the decline stage, informational appeals may be used to convey new uses for the product.
• Informational appeals are used when existing product problems arise and are used to resort to persuasion to reach original objectives.
• Persuasion is any change in beliefs and attitudes that results from communication with the intent to change consumer responses.
• Alpha strategies directly increase the attractiveness of the offer or message, whereas Omega strategies persuades and induce compliance by reducing reluctance.
• The naïve approach assumes that advertising must be effective because advertising expenditures are vast.
• The economic approach correlates advertising expenditures with changes in sales volume.
• The media approach conceptualizes advertising effectiveness in terms of individual exposure to the message.
• The creative approach assumes that a message is effective with great creation the psychological approach seeks effects at individual level.
• Consumer responses are at an individual level and include thoughts, feelings, and actions, or cognitive, affective and behavioral responses.
• Cognitive responses relates to beliefs and thoughts about brands, products and services, brand awareness, recall and recognition, and attitudes.
• Attitudes are a categorization of a stimulus object along an evaluative dimension.

Week 2: Lecture 2: Memory and attitudes

• To measure the effectiveness of a campaign, you need to see how advertising affects consumer memory and consumer attitudes.
• Memory function: store, encode, and retrieve information that can be kept in the cognitive system.
• The external stimulus is somehow encoded into the cognitive system, then retrieved.
• Sensory memory involves seeing, hearing, touching and the input.
• Working memory is temporary with limited space and is mainly about the sound and visual.
• Long-term memory is permanent and mainly about semantics.
• Those that lost short-term memory can steal retrieve information as well
• Baddeley & Hitch describe speech, and visuospatial information being collected, then processed.
• Central executive functions as a merely control board coordinating the transfer across sections.

Forms of long-term memory

• Episodic memory is memories such as holidays and graduation.
• Semantic memory is knowledge, or things that you learn.
• Procudural memory involves processes or procedures one has to take.
• Explicit Memory is Episodic and Systematic, easily measured by what we can conscientously bring to mind.
• Implicit Memory requires measurements of word completion.
• Few people expose themselves intentionally to advertising messages and incidental exposure is of greater impact.
• Free recall means describe one ad on the previous slide, whereas recognition which of the ads appeared before.
• Explicit tasks uses brain recondition and implicit one is no reference to advertisement and the search process is absent.

Knowledge structures

• Categories are how something is related to prototypes.
• Food fast food McDonalds as an example.
• Script: sequence of events, relationship between categories or the rules of what to do. Priming can increase accessibility in words or objects