Consumers and the Communications Process

Source Credibility

Source credibility means that consumers perceive the source (the spokesperson) as an expert who is objective and trustworthy (“I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV”). A credible source will provide information on competing products, not just one product, to help the consumer make a more informed choice. We also see the impact of credibility in Web sites like eBay or Wikipedia and numerous blogs, where readers rate the quality of others’ submissions to enable the entire audience to judge whose posts are worth reading.

Source Attractiveness

Source attractiveness refers to the source’s perceived social value, not just his or her physical appearance. High social value comes partly from physical attractiveness but also from personality, social status, or similarity to the receiver. We like to listen to people who are like us, which is why “typical” consumers are effective when they endorse everyday products.

So, when we think about source attractiveness, it’s important to keep in mind that “attractiveness” is not just physical beauty. The advertising that is most effective isn’t necessarily the one that pairs a Hollywood hottie with a product. Indeed, one study found that many students were more convinced by an endorsement from a fictional fellow student than from a celebrity. As a researcher explained, “They [students] like to make sure their product is fashionable and trendy among people who resemble them, rather than approved by celebrities like David Beckham, Brad Pitt or Scarlett Johansson. So they are more influenced by an endorsement from an ordinary person like them.”Quoted in “Celebrity Ads’ Impact Questioned,” BBC News, 27 February 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/somerset/6400419.stm (accessed October 31, 2007).

Still, all things equal, there’s a lot of evidence that physically attractive people are more persuasive. Our culture (like many others) has a bias toward good-looking people that teaches they are more likely to possess other desirable traits as well. Researchers call this the “what is beautiful is good” hypothesis.Karen Dion, Ellen Berscheid, and Elaine Walster, “What Is Beautiful Is Good,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 24 (1972): 285–90. Unfortunately, in many cases, while beauty is only skin deep, “ugly is to da bone.”Some of the material in this chapter was adapted from Michael R. Solomon, Consumer Behavior: Buying, Having and Being, 8th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2008).

Is It Better to Be an Expert or Hot?

Is source attractiveness more important than source credibility? The answer depends on the product or service you sell.

When to use credibility. If the product is utilitarian and complex (that is, consumers may not know much about how to use it), then a credible expert will be the most effective at persuading people to buy the product or service.

When to use attractiveness. If, on the other hand, the item is simple to understand (like clothing) but has a high social risk (that is, we’re concerned about the impression we’ll make on others if we’re seen with this item) then an attractive source will be more persuasive.

Sometimes you’re lucky enough to have a spokesperson who is both credible and attractive. This was the case for SS+K’s pro bono campaign for the United Nations peacekeepers when ads featured hunky UN messenger for peace George Clooney.

Involvement and Perceived Risk

One important driver is a consumer’s extent of involvement with a brand or product category. It’s tempting to assume that we put more thought into purchases that are expensive, but this isn’t necessarily true. We might be motivated to put a great deal of thought and effort into choosing even a relatively cheap product if we feel our choice will reflect something about ourselves to others.

And involvement often is a function of the product’s degree of perceived risk:

• Physical risk. Will the wrong choice endanger my health or that of my family?
• Financial risk. Will the wrong choice cost me too much money?
• Social risk. Will the wrong choice embarrass me or lead to the wrong impression?

Heuristics: Rules of Thumb

Hershey or Nestlé? Coke or Pepsi? Charmin or Bounty? Lil Wayne or Usher? People don’t have the time or desire to ponder endlessly about every purchase. Heuristics are shortcuts or mental “rules of thumb” that we use when we make a decision—especially when we choose among products in a category where we don’t see huge differences or if the outcome isn’t do or die. These rules simplify the decision-making process by making it quick and easy. Common heuristics include these:

• Save the most money. Many people follow a rule like, “I’ll buy the lowest-priced choice so that I spend the least money right now.” Using this heuristic means you don’t need to look beyond the price tag to make a decision. Wal-Mart built a retailing empire by pleasing shoppers who follow this rule.
• You get what you pay for. Others might use the opposite heuristic, namely, “I’ll buy the more expensive product, because higher price often means better quality.” These consumers are influenced by ads alluding to exclusivity, quality, and uncompromising performance.
• Stick to the tried and true. Brand loyalty also simplifies the decision-making process—we buy the brand that we’ve always bought before, and thus we don’t need to spend more time and effort on the decision. It’s hard to downplay the importance of brand loyalty—and of the role that advertising plays in creating and maintaining it. In a study of the market leaders in thirty product categories, twenty-seven of the brands that were number one in 1930 (such as Ivory Soap and Campbell’s Soup) still were at the top over fifty years later.Richard W. Stevenson, “The Brands with Billion-Dollar Names,” New York Times, October 28, 1988, A1. Clearly “choose a well-known brand name” is a powerful heuristic.

Response Hierarchies: Which Comes First?

Thinking, feeling, and doing can happen in any order. Psychologists originally assumed that we form attitudes through a fixed sequence of these three components: We first think about the object, then evaluate our feelings about it, and finally take action: Cognition → Affect → Behavior.

Research evidence, however, shows that we form attitudes in different sequences based on different circumstances. If we’re not very involved in or don’t care much about a purchase, we may just buy a product on impulse or because we remember a catchphrase about it instead of carefully evaluating it in relation to other products. In that case, action precedes feeling and thought: Behavior → Affect → Cognition.

Conversely, feelings—rather than thoughts—may drive the entire decision process; our emotional reactions may drive us to buy a product simply because we like its name, its packaging design, or the brand image that ads create. In this case, we see the product, have a feeling about it, and buy it: Affect → Behavior → Cognition.

Multiattribute Attitude Models

As you can see, attitudes are complex. Because of this complexity, researchers use multiattribute attitude models to explain them. Simply put, multiattribute models say that we form attitudes about a product based on several attributes of that product, our beliefs about those attributes, and the relative importance we assign to those attributes.

The decision to purchase a car like an SUV offers a good illustration of how a multiattribute model affects purchase behavior. On the one hand, the styling and stance of a particular model might evoke feelings of power, confidence, and ruggedness. The vehicle’s high ground clearance and roomy back might be great for the consumer’s intended camping trips. On the other hand, the brand could make the consumer ill at ease—perhaps a friend had a bad experience with that car maker. And the more rational side of a consumer might balk at the high cost and poor gas mileage. Yet the vehicle looks great, so the consumer isn’t sure. And, regardless of his personal feelings about the vehicle, the consumer may also factor in social pressure: will his friends criticize him as a wasteful gas-guzzler if he buys an SUV instead of a compact hybrid? Will he buy or won’t he? The decision depends on how the buyer combines and weights these positive and negative attitude components. The suspense is killing us…

The Gift or the Wrapping? The Elaboration Likelihood Model

So what’s the bottom line for advertising—is it the gift or the wrapping that counts? The research helps us understand how to design the advertising message so that it has the most influence. If we advertise to consumers who are highly involved in the purchase decision-making process, then those consumers will primarily use their thinking to drive the decision. Therefore, strong, rational arguments (the “gift”) will be most persuasive for them.

On the other hand, consumers who are less involved will be more influenced by the “wrapping”—the images, sounds, and feelings they see or remember about the product. For them, it may be more important that Tiger Woods endorsed the car than that it gets better gas mileage than another model.

The elaboration likelihood model summarizes this theory. Under conditions of high involvement, the consumer will be more likely to process the content of the message, form an attitude about it, and make a purchase decision. Under low involvement, the consumer will respond to the style of the message (an attractive package, a popular spokesperson) rather than its substance.

Sensory Marketing and Advertising Stimuli

Before a stimulus such as an image or sound can elicit a particular reaction in us, we first have to notice it. In today’s cluttered advertising environment, that’s no small feat. How can advertisers break through the clutter and get into the game?

Stimuli that differ from other stimuli around them are more likely to get noticed. Four ways to command a receiver’s attention are size (bigger stimuli tend to command more attention), color that differs from its surroundings, position (right-hand page magazine ads get more attention than left-hand ones), and novelty (ads in places where you don’t expect them, like walls of tunnels or restrooms).

Procter & Gamble decided to use the sense of smell to catch consumers’ attention. P&G put up posters at bus stops in London for its antidandruff shampoo Head & Shoulders Citrus Fresh. The twist: passersby could get a whiff of the scent by pushing a button on the poster.facstaff.bloomu.edu/sbatory/Adoption%20diffusion%208Aug06%20n36%20.ppt (accessed October 31, 2007).

In a very different application, Miller Genuine Draft uses a label on its beers that has special optical brighteners that light up in black light. When a nightclub turns on its black lights, for example, the bottles visually pop off the shelf because the labels glow in the dark.Leah Genuario, “Sensory Packaging: Branding that Makes Sense(s)” Flexible Packaging 9, no. 7 (2007): 12.

Subliminal Advertising

What is the hidden message in that magazine ad you’re looking at? Are you getting brainwashed by innocent-looking TV commercials that “order” you to buy a product? If you believe advertisers are doing their best to place “secret messages” all around you, you’re not alone. Subliminal perceptionis a topic that has captivated the public for more than fifty years, despite the fact that there is virtually no proof that this process has any effect on consumer behavior. Another word for perceptual threshold is limen (just remember “the secret of Sprite”), and we term stimuli that fall below the limen subliminal. So subliminal perception (supposedly) occurs when the stimulus is below the level of the consumer’s awareness.

A survey of American consumers found that almost two-thirds believe in the existence of subliminal advertising, and more than one-half are convinced that this technique can get them to buy things they do not really want.Michael Lev, “No Hidden Meaning Here: Survey Sees Subliminal Ads,” New York Times, May 3, 1991, D7. They believe marketers design many advertising messages so the consumers perceive them unconsciously, or below the threshold of recognition. For example, several authors single out beverage ads as they point to ambiguous shapes in ice cubes they claim are actually women’s bodies or erotic words. Most recently, ABC rejected a Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) commercial that invited viewers to slowly replay the ad to find a secret message, citing the network’s long-standing policy against subliminal advertising. KFC argued that the ad wasn’t subliminal at all because the company was telling viewers about the message and how to find it. The network wasn’t convinced—but you should be.Ron Ruggless, “2006 the Year in Review: Even as High Costs, New Regulations and Health Concerns Test Operators, Industry Moves forward with Innovative Products, Proactive Strategies and Big Business Deals,” Nation’s Restaurant News, December 18, 2006, http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-29087275_ITM (accessed February 13, 2009).

Like this KFC ad, most examples of subliminal advertising that people “discover” are not subliminal at all—on the contrary, the images are quite apparent. Remember, if you can see it or hear it, it’s notsubliminal; the stimulus is above the level of conscious awareness. Nonetheless, the continuing controversy about subliminal persuasion has been important in shaping the public’s beliefs about advertisers’ and marketers’ abilities to manipulate consumers against their will.

Although some research suggests that subliminal messages can work under very specific conditions, this technique has very little applicability to advertising even if we wanted to resort to it. For one, an advertiser would have to send a message that’s very carefully tailored to each individual rather than to a large audience. In addition, there are wide individual differences in threshold levels (what we’re capable of consciously perceiving); for a message to avoid conscious detection by consumers who have low thresholds, it would have to be so weak that it would not reach those who have high thresholds.

However, a new study surely will add fuel to the long-raging debate. The researchers reported evidence that a mere thirty-millisecond exposure to a well-known brand logo can in fact influence behavior; specifically the study found that people who were exposed to a quick shot of Apple’s logo thought more creatively in a laboratory task (mission: come up with innovative uses for a brick) than did those who saw the IBM logo.Thomas Claburn, “Apple’s Logo Makes You More Creative than IBM’s,” Informationweek, March 19, 2008, http://www.Informationweek.Com/News/Internet/Showarticle.Jhtml?Articleid=206904786(accessed March 19, 2008). Apple will no doubt love the implication, but most other advertisers are too focused on efforts to persuade you when you’re aware of what they’re up to.

Learning

Learning is a relatively permanent change in behavior caused by experience. The learner need not have the experience directly; we can also learn by observing events that affect others.Robert A. Baron, Psychology: The Essential Science (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1989). We learn even when we don’t try: Consumers recognize many brand names and they can hum many product jingles, for example, even for products they themselves do not use. We call this casual, unintentional acquisition of knowledge incidental learning.

Theories of learning range from those that focus on simple stimulus-response connections (behavioral theories) to perspectives that regard consumers as solvers of complex problems who learn abstract rules and concepts as they observe others (cognitive theories). Basic learning principles are at the heart of many advertising efforts.

Behavioral Learning Theories

Behavioral learning theories assume that learning takes place as the result of responses to external events. For example, if a song we remember fondly from high school gets repeatedly paired with a brand name, over time our warm memories about the tune will rub off onto the advertised product. This process works even when the product’s name initially has no meaning at all—think about the likes of Marlboro, Adidas, and Exxon, which we have learned to respond to with strong emotions.

According to this perspective, the feedback we receive as we go through life shapes our experiences. Similarly, we respond to brand names, scents, jingles, and other marketing stimuli because of the learned connections we form over time. People also learn that actions they take result in rewards and punishments; this feedback influences the way they will respond in similar situations in the future. Consumers who receive compliments on a product choice will be more likely to buy that brand again, but those who get food poisoning at a new restaurant are not likely to patronize it in the future.

Learning about Brands

What’s more, the reactions we learn to one object tend to transfer to other, similar objects in a process psychologists term stimulus generalization. That explains why a drugstore’s bottle of private brand mouthwash deliberately packaged to resemble Listerine mouthwash may evoke a similar response among consumers, who assume that this me-too product shares other characteristics of the original. Indeed, consumers in one study on shampoo brands tended to rate those with similar packages as similar in quality and performance as well.James Ward, Barbara Loken, Ivan Ross, and Tedi Hasapopoulous, “The Influence of Physical Similarity of Affect and Attribute Perceptions from National Brands to Private Label Brands,” in American Marketing Educators’ Conference, ed. Terence A. Shimp and others (Chicago: American Marketing Association, 1986), 51–56.

Stimulus generalization is the basic idea underlying numerous branding strategies that share this approach: (1) Create a brand name that consumers learn to associate with positive qualities; (2) paste that brand name on other, reasonably similar products; (3) stand back and let the positive associations transfer to the new item.

This approach explains the success of these branding strategies:

• Family branding. Many products capitalize on the reputation of a company name. Companies such as Campbell’s, Heinz, and General Electric rely on their positive corporate images to sell different product lines.
• Product line extensions. Marketers add related products to an established brand. Dole, which we associate with fruit, introduced refrigerated juices and juice bars, whereas Sun Maid went from raisins to raisin bread.
• Licensing. Companies often “rent” well-known names. Christian Dior licenses the designer’s name to products from underwear to umbrellas.

Cognitive Learning Theories

According to the behavioral learning perspective, to a large extent the same principles that animal trainers use to teach dogs to dance (i.e., rewarding some movements with a treat while discouraging others with a loud no) operate to condition our preferences for brands. OK, it’s a little insulting—but the sad truth is it’s often true!

Of course (you respond indignantly), many things we learn are far more complex than a simple association between a stimulus and a response—and many powerful ads succeed because they tell complicated stories or convey abstract meanings. In contrast to behavioral theories of learning, cognitive learning theory approaches stress the importance of internal mental processes. This perspective views people as problem solvers who actively use information from the world around them to master their environments. Supporters of this view also stress the role of creativity and insight during the learning process.

One important aspect of a cognitive learning perspective is observational learning; this occurs when people change their own attitudes or behaviors simply by watching the actions of others—learning occurs as a result of vicarious rather than direct experience. This type of learning is a complex process; people store these observations in memory as they accumulate knowledge, perhaps using this information at a later point to guide their own behavior. Modeling (not the kind Tyra Banks does) is the process of imitating the behavior of others. For example, a woman who shops for a new kind of perfume may remember the reactions her friend received when she wore a certain brand several months earlier, and she will mimic her friend’s behavior with the hope of getting the same feedback. You should have no trouble thinking of advertisements you’ve seen that encourage you to model an actor’s behaviors at a later point in time. Try teaching that to a lab rat.

Types of Memory

Psychologists distinguish among three distinct types of memory systems, each of which plays a role in processing brand-related information:

1. Sensory memory permits storage of the information we receive from our senses. This storage is very temporary; it lasts a couple of seconds at most. For example, a woman walks past the perfume counter in a department store and gets a quick, aromatic whiff of Brit for Women by Burberry. Although this sensation lasts only a few seconds, it is sufficient to allow her to consider whether she should investigate further. If she retains this information for further processing, it passes into short-term memory.
2. Short-term memory (STM) also stores information for a limited period of time, and it has limited capacity. This is similar to working memory in a computer; it holds the information we are currently processing. Our memories can store verbal input acoustically (in terms of how it sounds) or semantically (in terms of what it means). We store it when we combine small pieces of data into larger chunks. A chunk is a configuration that is familiar to the person and that she can think about as a unit. For example, a brand name like Glow by JLo can be a chunk that summarizes a great deal of detailed information about the product.
3. Long-term memory (LTM) is the system that allows us to retain information for a long period of time. Information passes from STM into LTM via the process of elaborative rehearsal. This means we actively think about the chunk’s meaning and relate it to other information already in memory. Advertisers sometimes assist in the process when they devise catchy slogans or jingles that consumers repeat on their own. So, “don’t leave home without it,” “just do it,” or “let your fingers do the walking.”

How Do We Store Information in Memory?

It’s important to understand how we store all of the massive amounts of information we retain in our minds. Just like a really disorganized “filing cabinet from hell,” our memories about brands (not to mention everything else we know) are useless if we don’t know where to find them. Advertisers can structure their communication to make it more likely that subsequent messages will call up the knowledge of a brand we’ve already absorbed.

A popular perspective on this process is an activation model of memory, which proposes that each incoming piece of information in LTM is stored in an associative network that contains many bits of information we see as related. Each of us has organized systems of concepts relating to brands, manufacturers, and merchants stored in our memories; the contents, of course, depend on our own unique experiences.

Think of these storage units, or knowledge structures, as complex spider webs filled with pieces of data. Incoming information gets put into nodes that link to one another. When we view separate pieces of information as similar for some reason, we chunk them together under some more abstract category. Then we interpret new incoming information to be consistent with the structure we have created. This helps explain why we are better able to remember brands or merchants that we believe “go together”—for example, when Juicy Couture rather than Home Depot sponsors a fashion show.

A marketing message may activate our memory of a brand directly (for example, by showing us a picture of it), or it may do so indirectly if it links to something else that’s related to the brand in our knowledge structure. If it activates a node, it will also activate other linked nodes, much as tapping a spider’s web in one spot sends movement reverberating across the web. Meaning thus spreads across the network, and we recall concepts, such as competing brands and relevant attributes, that we use to form attitudes toward the brand. Researchers label this process spreading activation.

How Do We Access Our Memories?

Retrieval is the process whereby we recover information from long-term memory. Each of us has a vast quantity of information stored in our heads (quick: What team won last year’s Super Bowl? Who is the current “American idol”?), but these pieces of data may be difficult or impossible to retrieve unless the appropriate cues are present.

Individual cognitive or physiological factors are responsible for some of the differences we see in retrieval ability among people.S. Danziger, S. Moran, and V. Rafaely, “The Influence of Ease of Retrieval on Judgment as a Function of Attention to Subjective Experience,” Journal of Consumer Psychology 16, no. 2 (2006): 191–95. Some older adults consistently display inferior recall ability for current items, such as prescription drug instructions, although they may recall events that happened to them when they were younger with great clarity.Roger W. Morrell, Denise C. Park, and Leonard W. Poon, “Quality of Instructions on Prescription Drug Labels: Effects on Memory and Comprehension in Young and Old Adults,” The Gerontologist 29 (1989): 345–54. Other factors that influence retrieval are situational; they relate to the environment in which the message is delivered.

Not surprisingly, recall is enhanced when we pay more attention to the message in the first place. Some evidence indicates that we can retrieve information about a pioneering brand (the first brand to enter a market) more easily from memory than we can for follower brands, because the first product’s introduction is likely to be distinctive and, for the time being, has no competitors to divert our attention.Frank R. Kardes, Gurumurthy Kalyanaram, Murali Chandrashekaran, and Ronald J. Dornoff, “Brand Retrieval, Consideration Set Composition, Consumer Choice, and the Pioneering Advantage” (unpublished manuscript, the University of Cincinnati, Ohio, 1992). In addition, we are more likely to recall descriptive brand names than those that do not provide adequate cues as to what the product is.Judith Lynne Zaichkowsky and Padma Vipat, “Inferences from Brand Names,” paper presented at the European meeting of the Association for Consumer Research, Amsterdam, June 1992.

Of course, the nature of the ad itself also plays a big role in determining whether we’ll remember it. We’re far more likely to remember spectacular magazine ads, including multipage spreads, three-dimensional pop-ups, scented ads, and ads with audio components.Erik Sass, “Study Finds Spectacular Print Ads Get Spectacular Recall,” Marketing Daily, February 23, 2007, http://www.mediapost.com (accessed February 23, 2007). Here are some other factors advertisers need to remember:

• State-dependent retrieval. We are better able to access information if our internal state is the same at the time of recall as when we learned the information. If, for example, we recreate the cues that were present when the information was first presented, we can enhance recall. That’s why Life cereal uses a picture of “Mikey” from its commercial on the cereal box, which facilitates recall of brand claims and favorable brand evaluations.Kevin Keller, “Memory Factors in Advertising: The Effect of Advertising Retrieval Cues on Brand Evaluations,” Journal of Consumer Research 14 (1987): 316–33.
• Familiarity. Familiarity enhances recall. Indeed, this is one of the basic goals of marketers who try to create and maintain awareness of their products. However, this sword can cut both ways: Extreme familiarity can result in inferior learning and recall. When consumers are highly familiar with a brand or an advertisement, they may pay less attention to the message because they do not believe that any additional effort will yield a gain in knowledge.Eric J. Johnson and J. Edward Russo, “Product Familiarity and Learning New Information,” in Kent Monroe, ed., Advances in Consumer Research 8 (Ann Arbor, MI: Association for Consumer Research, 1981): 151–55; John G. Lynch and Thomas K. Srull, “Memory and Attentional Factors in Consumer Choice: Concepts and Research Methods,” Journal of Consumer Research 9 (June 1982): 18–37.
• Salience. The salience of a brand refers to its prominence or level of activation in memory. As we have already noted, stimuli that stand out in contrast to their environments are more likely to command attention which, in turn, increases the likelihood that we will recall them. This explains why unusual advertising or distinctive packaging tends to facilitate brand recall.Joseph W. Alba and Amitava Chattopadhyay, “Salience Effects in Brand Recall,” Journal of Marketing Research23 (November 1986): 363–70; Elizabeth C. Hirschman and Michael R. Solomon, “Utilitarian, Aesthetic, and Familiarity Responses to Verbal versus Visual Advertisements,” in Advances in Consumer Research 11, ed. Thomas C. Kinnear (Provo, UT: Association for Consumer Research, 1984): 426–31.
• Novelty. Introducing a surprise element in an ad can be particularly effective in aiding recall, even if it is not relevant to the factual information the ad presents.Susan E. Heckler and Terry L. Childers, “The Role of Expectancy and Relevancy in Memory for Verbal and Visual Information: What Is Incongruency?” Journal of Consumer Research 18 (March 1992): 475–92. In addition, mystery ads, in which the ad doesn’t identify the brand until the end, are more effective at building associations in memory between the product category and that brand—especially in the case of relatively unknown brands.Russell H. Fazio, Paul M. Herr, and Martha C. Powell, “On the Development and Strength of Category-Brand Associations in Memory: The Case of Mystery Ads,” Journal of Consumer Psychology 1, no. 1 (1992): 1–13.
• Pictorial versus verbal cues. Is a picture worth a thousand words? Indeed, we are more likely to recognize information presented in picture form at a later time.Terry Childers and Michael Houston, “Conditions for a Picture-Superiority Effect on Consumer Memory,” Journal of Consumer Research 11 (September 1984): 643–54; Terry Childers, Susan Heckler, and Michael Houston, “Memory for the Visual and Verbal Components of Print Advertisements,” Psychology & Marketing 3 (Fall 1986): 147–50. Certainly, visual aspects of an ad are more likely to grab a consumer’s attention. In fact, eye-movement studies indicate that about 90 percent of viewers look at the dominant picture in an ad before they bother to view the copy.Werner Krober-Riel, “Effects of Emotional Pictorial Elements in Ads Analyzed by Means of Eye Movement Monitoring,” in Advances in Consumer Research 11, ed. Thomas C. Kinnear (Provo, UT: Association for Consumer Research, 1984): 591–96. But, while ads with vivid images may enhance recall, they do not necessarily improve comprehension. One study found that television news items presented with illustrations (still pictures) as a backdrop result in improved recall for details of the news story, even though understanding of the story’s content did not improve.Hans-Bernd Brosius, “Influence of Presentation Features and News Context on Learning from Television News,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 33 (Winter 1989): 1–14.

What Makes Us Forget?

Marketers obviously hope that consumers will not forget about their products. However, in a poll of more than thirteen thousand adults, more than half were unable to remember any specific ad they had seen, heard, or read in the past thirty days.Raymond R. Burke and Thomas K. Srull, “Competitive Interference and Consumer Memory for Advertising,” Journal of Consumer Research 15 (June 1988): 55–68. How many can you remember right now? Clearly, forgetting by consumers is a big headache for marketers (not to mention a problem for students when they study for exams!).

Why do we forget? Some memories simply fade with the passage of time; they decay as the structural changes learning produces in the brain simply go away. But most forgetting is due to interference; as we learn additional information, it displaces the earlier information. Because we store pieces of information in associative networks, we are more likely to retrieve a meaning concept when it’s connected by a larger number of links. As we integrate new concepts, a stimulus is no longer as effective to retrieve the old response. These interference effects help to explain why we have trouble remembering brand information. Since we tend to organize attribute information by brand, when we learn additional attribute information about the brand or about similar brands, this limits our ability to activate the older information.Joan Meyers-Levy, “The Influence of Brand Name’s Association Set Size and Word Frequency on Brand Memory,” Journal of Consumer Research 16 (September 1989): 197–208.

The Market Maven

Opinion leaders tend to “specialize” in a category (e.g., fashion or electronics), while a market maven likes to transmit marketplace information of all types. These shopaholics simply like to stay on top of what’s happening in the marketplace.For discussion of the market maven construct, see Lawrence F. Feick and Linda L. Price, “The Market Maven,” Managing (July 1985): 10; scale items adapted from Lawrence F. Feick and Linda L. Price, “The Market Maven: A Diffuser of Marketplace Information,” Journal of Marketing 51 (January 1987): 83–87. They are likely to strongly agree with statements like “I like helping people by providing them with information about many kinds of products” and “My friends think of me as a good source of information when it comes to new products or sales.” Anyone you know?

The Surrogate Consumer

Unlike an informal opinion leader, a surrogate consumer is a person whom we hire to provide input into our purchase decisions. These include interior decorators, stockbrokers, professional shoppers, and even college consultants who help prospective students identify schools that will be the best match for them. Surrogates can exert a huge influence on consumers’ decisions. Advertisers tend to overlook surrogates when they try to convince consumers to buy their goods or services. This can be a big mistake: they may mistarget their communications to end consumers instead of to the surrogates who actually sift through product information and decide among product alternatives. For example, in many cases (particularly for more affluent people) it’s an interior designer who makes a lot of decisions about the furnishings a client will put into a room; the client just writes the check.Michael R. Solomon, “The Missing Link: Surrogate Consumers in the Marketing Chain,” Journal of Marketing 50 (October 1986): 208–18.

Reference Groups

A reference group is “an actual or imaginary individual or group conceived of as having significant relevance upon an individual’s evaluations, aspirations or behavior.”C. Whan Park and V. Parker Lessig, “Students and Housewives: Differences in Susceptibility to Reference Group Influence,” Journal of Consumer Research 4 (September 1977): 102–10. Reference groups are important because they determine to whom we’ll listen (for example, we’re more likely to heed the advice of friends than strangers). Advertising messages that come from members of our reference group will have more influence over us, because we want to fit in and conform to that group.

Why are reference groups so persuasive? The answer lies in the potential power they wield over us. Social power is “the capacity to alter the actions of others.”Kenneth J. Gergen and Mary Gergen, Social Psychology (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 312. To the degree to which you are able to make someone else do something, regardless of whether they do it willingly, you have power over that person. The experts and beautiful people we discussed earlier tend to possess social power over the rest of us, but for different reasons.

Subcultures

A subculture is a group of people whose members share common beliefs and common experiences. A subculture may be based on religion, age, ethnic background, race, and even on the place where we live. Silicon Valley subculture contrasts with that of the Deep South or Boston’s Back Bay, for example. We’ll get into some of these groups in more detail when we discuss market segmentation.

Taste Cultures

In contrast to larger, demographically based subcultures (which nature usually determines), people who are part of a taste culture freely choose to identify with a lifestyle or aesthetic preference. For example, vegans avoid using or consuming animal products; they choose to avoid eating meat or eggs; wearing fur, leather, wool, or down; and using cosmetics or chemical products tested on animals. These are overt expressions of a lifestyle philosophy (cruelty-free), but adherents also respond to messages that are consistent with their needs. For example, at http://www.mooshoes.com, you can buy vegan shoes that feature faux leather lining and a faux suede exterior.

Brand Communities

A brand community is a group of consumers who share a set of social relationships based upon usage or interest in a product. At the Web site http://www.jonessoda.com, community members submit their own label photos, and they view and rate the forty-three thousand photos other members have submitted.http://smackinc.com/media/pdf/brand_communities_jones_soda.pdf (accessed July 8, 2008). Unlike other kinds of communities, these members typically don’t live near each other—except when they may meet for brief periods at organized events or brandfests that community-oriented companies such as Jeep, Saturn, or Harley-Davidson sponsor. These events help owners to “bond” with fellow enthusiasts and strengthen their identification with the product as well as with others they meet who share their passion.

A consumer tribe is a similar concept; this term refers to a group of people who identify with one another because of a shared allegiance to an activity or a product. Although these tribes are often unstable and short-lived, at least for a time members identify with others through shared emotions, moral beliefs, styles of life, and of course the products they jointly consume as part of their tribal affiliation. Pontiac opened a community hub on Yahoo! it calls Pontiac Underground (http://pontiacunderground.com, “Where Passion for Pontiac Is Driven by You”). The carmaker does no overt marketing on the site; the idea is to let drivers find it and spread the word themselves. Users share photos and videos of cars using Flickr and Yahoo! Video. A Yahoo! Answers Zone enables knowledge sharing. Meanwhile, a list of Pontiac clubs in the physical world and on Yahoo! Groups allows users to connect offline and online.Laurie Petersen, “Pontiac Goes Underground to Tap Fans,” Marketing Daily, February 8, 2007, http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.show Article&art_aid=55227 (accessed February 8, 2007); http://pontiacunderground.autos.yahoo.com(accessed July 8, 2008).

Yes: Standardize for Greater Efficiency

Some advertisers say that advertising does travel from country to country. Proponents of this viewpoint argue that many cultures, especially those of industrialized countries, have become so homogenized that the same advertising will work throughout the world. By developing one approach for multiple markets, an advertiser benefits from economies of scale because it does not have to incur the substantial time and expense to develop a separate campaign for each culture.Theodore Levitt, The Marketing Imagination (New York: The Free Press, 1983). The 2006 World Cup, which was broadcast in 189 countries to one of the biggest global television audiences ever, illustrates how a standardized approach looks. MasterCard ran ads that appeared in thirty-nine countries, so its ad agency came up with a spot called “Fever,” in which a hundred-odd cheering fans from thirty countries appear. There’s no dialogue, so it works in any language. At the end, the words, “Football fever. Priceless” appeared under the MasterCard logo.Aaron O. Patrick, “World Cup’s Advertisers Hope One Size Fits All: Month-Long Tournament Sets Off Scramble to Reach Huge Global TV Audience,” Wall Street Journal, March 28, 2006, B7.

No: Customize to Appeal to Local Tastes

Other advertisers point to huge variations across cultures. They feel that each culture is unique, with its own value system, conventions, and regulations. This perspective argues that each country has a national character, a distinctive set of behavior and personality characteristics.Terry Clark, “International Marketing and National Character: A Review and Proposal for an Integrative Theory,” Journal of Marketing 54 (October 1990): 66–79. An advertiser must therefore tailor its strategy to the sensibilities of each specific culture.

At a basic level, the need to customize is a no-brainer: Consumers speak many different languages, and intended meanings in one tongue don’t always translate seamlessly to another. It’s unlikely that Bimbo, a popular Mexican bread brand, or Super Piss, a Scandinavian product to unfreeze car locks, would go over well in the United States.

Advertisers have (for the most part) learned the hard way over the years to avoid obvious language gaffes. They often conduct back-translation, where a different interpreter retranslates a translated ad back into its original language to catch errors.Shelly Reese, “Culture Shock,” Marketing Tools (May 1998): 44–49; Steve Rivkin, “The Name Game Heats Up,” Marketing News, April 22, 1996, 8; David A. Ricks, “Products That Crashed into the Language Barrier,” Business and Society Review (Spring 1983): 46–50. Still, mistakes do creep in:

• The Scandinavian company that makes Electrolux vacuum cleaners introduced the products in United States with this slogan: “Nothing sucks like an Electrolux.”
• When Parker marketed a ballpoint pen in Mexico, its claim “It won’t leak in your pocket and embarrass you” came out as “It won’t leak in your pocket and make you pregnant.”
• Fresca (a soft drink) is Mexican slang for “lesbian.”
• Ford also ran into problems in Latin markets. The company had to change the names for its Fiera truck and its Caliente and Pinto cars. In Spanish, a fiera is an ugly old woman and a caliente is slang for a streetwalker; pinto is Brazilian slang for “small male appendage.”
• Buick had to rename its LaCrosse sedan the Allure in Canada after the company discovered that the name comes awfully close to a Québécois word for masturbation.
• IKEA had to explain that the Gutvik children’s bunk bed is named “for a tiny town in Sweden” after German shoppers noted that the name sounded a lot like a phrase that means “good f**.” IKEA has yet to issue an explanation for a workbench it calls the Fartfull.Mark Lasswell, “Lost in Translation,” Business (August 2004): 68–70.

Language aside, there are many instances where cultural sensitivities vary widely, and advertisers that try to export their own symbolism to another country do so at their own peril. In China, an ad for Nippon Paint (a Japanese brand) caused an uproar; it showed a sculptured dragon unable to keep its grip on a pillar coated in smooth wood-coating paint. Dragons are potent symbols in China, and seeing one easily defeated by a Japanese product proved too much.“China Bans Offending Nike Advert,” BBC News, December 6, 2004, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4072203.stm(accessed February 13, 2009).

How Local Do Ads Need to Be?

So what’s the correct answer? Although it feels warm and fuzzy to state that people are people wherever you go, in practice the standardization perspective hasn’t worked out too well. One reason for the failure of global marketing is that consumers in different countries have varying conventions and customs, so they simply do not use products the same way. Kellogg’s, for example, discovered that in Brazil people don’t typically eat a big breakfast—they’re more likely to eat cereal as a dry snack.

True, some large corporations such as Coca-Cola have been pretty successful at crafting a single, international image. Still, even the soft drink giant must make minor modifications to the way it presents itself in each culture. Although Coke commercials are largely standardized, the company permits local agencies to edit them so they highlight close-ups of local faces.J. S. Hill and J. M. Winski, “Goodbye Global Ads: Global Village Is Fantasy Land for Big Marketers,” Advertising Age 58, no. 49 (1987): 22, 36. In their product as well as their advertising, Coke modifies the flavors of its product based on the tastes of the locals. These flavors can be taste-tested at Coke Headquarters in Atlanta or World of Coke at Disney’s Epcot Center in Orlando.

For a standardized approach to work, it needs to appeal to consumers in each market that share a lot in common (other than perhaps language and allegiance to one soccer team or another). Two types of consumers are good candidates: (1) affluent people who are “global citizens” and who come into contact with ideas from around the world through their travels, business contacts, and media experiences; and (2) young people whose tastes in music and fashion are strongly influenced by MTV and other media that broadcast many of the same images to multiple countries.

Components of Meaning

From a semiotic perspective, every marketing message has three basic components: an object, a sign(or symbol), and an interpretant. The object is the product that is the focus of the message (e.g., Burger King’s menu items). The sign is the sensory image that represents the intended meanings of the object (e.g., a funky “King”). The interpretant is the meaning derived (e.g., quirky, cool).

Signs relate to objects in one of three ways: They can resemble objects, be connected to them, or be conventionally tied to them.Arthur Asa Berger, Signs in Contemporary Culture: An Introduction to Semiotics (New York: Longman, 1984); Charles Sanders Peirce, in Collected Papers, ed. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur W. Burks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–1958). An icon is a sign that resembles the product in some way (e.g., the Apple logo is literally an apple). An index is a sign that is connected to a product because they share some property (e.g., the Rock of Gibraltar that stands for Prudential Insurance conveys the property of endurable dependability, which is what the company hopes clients will associate with its policies). A symbol is a sign that relates to a product by either conventional or agreed-on associations (e.g., the green Starbucks logo depicting an “earth mother” with long hair conveys environmental responsibility and alignment with nature). A lot of time, thought, and money go into creating brand names and logos that will clearly communicate a product’s image. The Nissan Xterra combines the word terrain with the letter X, which many young people associate with extreme sports, to give the brand name a cutting-edge, off-road feel.

Hyperreality

One of the hallmarks of modern advertising is that it creates a condition of hyperreality. This refers to the process of making real what is initially simulation or “hype.” In other words, advertisers create new relationships between objects and interpretants as they invent new connections between products and benefits, such as when they equate Marlboro cigarettes with the American frontier spirit.

Over time, the true relationship between the symbol and reality is no longer possible to discern in a hyperreal environment. The “artificial” associations between product symbols and the real world may take on lives of their own. Fictional characters routinely cross over from make-believe to the real world—sometimes they even “endorse” other products, as when a talking Mrs. Butterworth’s syrup bottle shows up in a TV commercial for GEICO insurance.