How is information from advertising acquired and processed by consumers? - Chapter 2

Consumer psychology concerns itself with the psychological antecedents, processes and consequences involved in the acquisition, use and disposal of products and services by consumers. Social cognition focuses on the way cognitive and affective processes are affected by, and influence, social behavior. Consumers acquire, represent and encode advertising information in four stages:

1. Preattentive analysis: general, non-goal directed, ‘surveillance’ of the environment.

2. Focal attention: after noticing a stimulus, it is brought into conscious awareness where it is identified and categorized.

3. Comprehension: the process of forming inferences pertaining to the semantic meaning of the stimulus.

4. Elaborative reasoning: the process by which the semantically represented stimulus is related to previously stored knowledge that allows for simple/complex inferences.

Automatic, non-conscious processes are more influential during stage 1 and 2. Reflective, conscious processes play an important role during stage 3 and 4. Involvement determines the allocation of resources needed for (non)focal attention, thereby influencing how consumers proceed through the stages. Outcome-relevant involvement reflects the extent to which the acquisition and use of a product is deemed to have personal consequences for the consumer. This is determined by factors like price and consumer goals.

What does preattentive analysis entail?

Information acquisition frequently involves only little higher-order cognitive activity (a consumer may only glance a second at an ad) and is often automatic and non-conscious. This type of preattentive processing results in storage of information in implicit memory. Implicit memory effects occur when the consumer has been exposed to a stimulus previously and involve information processing that is fast, parallel and effortless. Explicit memory refers to a person’s conscious recollection of facts/events.

Feature analysis and semantic analysis

Preattentive processing mainly relies on feature analysis, which is a quick analysis of the environment for basic familiarity and significance.

It implies that the memory trace produced through exposure to an advertisement only contains information on the perceptual features/design of the ad and not on its meaning. Product choice is only affected by an ad if the product looks identical to the ad. Otherwise it won’t be recognized and thus there is no future influence.

Preattentive processing can also include conceptual processing, resulting in a semantic analysis; analyzing the advertised product, capturing its meaning (what is it and what does it do?).
An advantage of preattentive processing is that an advertisement can influence future choice, even if the consumer is presented at the point of choice with a representation of the product that is perceptually different from the product in the ad.

Matching activation

Hemispheric lateralization implies that our brain hemispheres have evolved specialized processing units for specific types of information. Picture processing involves higher activation levels of the right hemisphere since that hemisphere is tailored towards more holistic, impressionistic processing. Picture advertisements should be placed in the left visual field. Text advertisements should be placed on the right.

The matching activation hypothesis assumes that when one hemisphere is activated by the information that accommodates the processing style of that particular hemisphere, the other one is encouraged to elaborate on secondary material. Thus when advertisements are not consciously attended to, but happen to be placed in such a position that they can be easily processed by the unused hemisphere, such exposure may result in increased conscious processing.

Preattentive analysis can also result in instant and non-conscious generation of emotions, in particular negative ones. When an urgency signal is induced unconsciously, fear and anxiety are the result, presumably prompting the organism to take immediate action to reduce the threat. Offering a remedy to remove the threat, e.g. buying the product, is then important for advertising effectiveness.

Preattentive processing and hedonic fluency

Hedonic fluency is the subjective ease with which a stimulus can be perceived and processed. This fluency can be based on perceptual or conceptual fluency.

Perceptual fluency reflects the ease with which the physical features such as modality, shape or brightness can be processed.

Conceptual fluency, on the other hand, reflects the ease with which the semantic meaning of an object comes to the consumer’s mind and thus reflects the processing of meaning.

Stimuli that have been encountered before, have been stored in memory and are more easily processed (familiarity). This is an important contributing factor to the ease of processing. When an ad is encountered incidentally, a subsequent conscious exposure produces hedonic fluency as a result of the previous exposure. This results in a positive affect which is mis-attributed to the focal ad, producing more favorable consumer responses.

(Non)focal consumer attention can be directed outward toward ads and brands presented in the consumer’s environment, or inward toward product-related information already stored in memory. Hedonic fluency may play a role in both types of processes.

Exposure to sequences of unrelated ads may affect consumer judgment as a function of the compatibility of the goals that the ads activate. If the goal of the target ad and the prime ad are compatible, the target ad produces more favorable evaluations than when the goals mismatch. This effect occurs because the goal activated by the priming ad increases the ease of processing of the target ad, if that ad serves the same self-regulatory goals as the priming ad.

This goal fluency results in positive affect that is mis-attributed to the focal ad and brand resulting in more favorable evaluations and intentions.

Inward directed attention can also cause fluency effects.

Simply measuring behavioral intentions seems to increase the likelihood of people actually performing that behavior. This is also known as the question-behaviour effect. Asking about some behavior renders the attitude toward that behavior more accessible and when that attitude is positive, the behavior becomes more likely. Another explanation for this is that it is the result of response fluency. Asking questions about behavior increases the hedonic fluency of the response to the questions, making perceptions at the time when the behavior might be performed more easily, positively affecting the likelihood of that behavior.

What does focal attention entail?

Conscious information processing involves focal attention, and is facilitated when consumer involvement turns from low to moderate. Because short-term (working) memory has a limited capacity, consumers select only a few stimuli to pay attention to. Therefore special features are needed that make stimuli stand out. Three classes of stimuli featured attract involuntary consumer attention, are salience, vividness and novelty.

Salience

Salience refers to the extent to which a stimulus is noticeably different from its environment. Ways to emphasize this difference are using humor or changing the camera angle used to focus on the target product. According to the figure-ground principle figural stimuli become focal whereas non-figural stimuli become non-focal. It captures the process by which stimuli can grab attention and everything else fades into the background. Salience effects are moderated by the extent to which individuals are motivated to process information: they should be at a maximum when processing motivation is low and vice versa.

Vividness

Vivid stimuli are emotionally interesting, concrete and image-provoking, and proximate in a sensory temporal or spatial way. Vividness can be a function of characteristics of the perceiver, or of the advertising stimulus itself. Concrete and image-provoking information in ads may be perceived and processed differently, depending on the extent to which the perceiver has a high or low intrinsic tendency to engage in visual imagery. High visualizers are more sensitive to vivid executional elements in advertising.

Novelty

A key factor driving a consumer perception of newness (novelty) is the extent to which product information is unfamiliar and dis-confirms existing consumer expectancies. Surprise mobilizes cognitive resources that are used to resolve the inconsistency between what was expected and what is actually encountered. Unexpected information results in extended causal reasoning, counter-factual thinking, and cognitive elaboration.

According to the expectancy dis-confirmation model consumers form expectancies about product performance before buying a product. These are in large part shaped by advertising. After purchase, they compare the actual product with their expectations. Advertisers are confronted with the dilemma between selling more due to unrealistic promising while disappointing customers and selling less but being honest to them.

Categorization

Categorization is the process by which incoming information is classified, that is, labeled as belonging to one or more categories based on a comparative assessment of features of the category and the incoming information.

The success of brand extensions depends largely on whether consumers categorize them as congruent with the parent brand or its associations.
The representativeness heuristic reflects the extent to which two stimuli are deemed to belong to the same overall category based on shared similarities. This might be used to predict whether consumers categorize a new product as a true innovation or perceive it as similar to existing products.

Another view is that moderate dissimilarity may benefit a brand extension because people sometimes take pleasure in solving moderate incongruities. The associated pleasure may be transferred to the focal brand which is then evaluated better.

Typicality and the pioneering advantage

Categorization effects also exist on individual products. The extent to which a product is prototypical for a category influences product liking (prototypical products are often liked better than less prototypical ones). However, prototypicality may not serve the brand in terms of advertising salience, where communicating contrast between the focal brand and competitors is pivotal. Pioneering advantage reflects the pioneering of a novel category and becoming the most prototypical representative of that category. The pioneer decides on what attributes competitors are judged, and competitors are judged on those attributes only after the pioneer, creating a winning situation for the pioneer.

Assimilation and contrast

In assimilation objects are classified as more similar to the parent category than they really are when the object and category are perceived as more congruent. Contrast implies a reverse phenomenon. The perception of attributes of the object can change in the direction of features of the parent category when assimilation occurs. Assimilation occurs when information is made salient, which can be included in the parent category.

As the perception of the category member can change when it is viewed in context of the parent category, so too can the perception of the parent category when viewed in context of a new member. This happens with brand extensions. The extent to which the new product affects the associations and beliefs of the parent category, again depends on the similarity of the new product to the parent category.

Impression formation and impression correction

A specific type of categorization occurs when not just products or brands are categorized, but also product or brand users as a function of associations related to a parent brand category. Aaker suggests that brands can have different personalities like people. The brand personality scale consists of 5 dimensions: sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, and ruggedness.
In stimulus-based impression formation salient stimulus information guides the impression formation process (e.g. inferences consumers make about someone who wears expensive clothes or who is sitting at the terrace of a golf club versus someone wearing cheap clothes and going to a cheap restaurant).

Memory-based consumer impression formation, on the other hand, is about assessing how firms can overcome the impact of negative versus positive initial consumer impressions about a brand. Impressions based on negative initial information are less amenable than those based on positive information. However, presenting new, or updating information influences the chances of correcting the initial impressions. Comparative information motivates recall of previous information and careful processing of the new information. When the initial impression was negative, a comparative format would motivate increased weighting of this negative information, compared to a non-comparative format resulting in less positive adjusted impressions than when no comparisons were made in the new information.

In what way is comprehension an important factor for persuasion?

After preattentive analysis and focal attention, the process of acquiring, representing and encoding information from advertising also entails a phase of comprehension. This is essential for achieving persuasion and should be an important factor in advertising effectiveness. Because comprehension is such an important factor for persuasion, mis-comprehension could pose a problem. However, this isn’t always the case. As a matter of fact, it sometimes even serves the goal of persuasion, partly because of the truth effect, that is, people’s tendency to initially uncritically accept information, even when certain elements are not fully comprehended.

Seeing is believing

Believing a message appears to be the default, low effort response and critically reappraising a conclusion is a second step not taken automatically. When processing resources are limited, believing becomes the default option and rejection the correction response. It is harder to reject than to accept an advertising claim, even when we know or are informed that the claim is false. In a cluttered media environment where information is constantly competing for our attention, conditions arise that resemble interruption condition: consumers tend to make decisions quickly and as effortlessly as possible and when distracted by too many competing messages they are less able to engage in the extra effort needed for disbelieving claims that have initially been accepted even though they were false.

Repetition increases familiarity, which in turn increases believability. Even repeatedly highlighting that a claim is false may not undo the truth effect. This may be due to the sleeper effect: repetition increases familiarity for the claim itself, fostering the perception that it is true, whereas it decreases memory for the original context of the claim (the message that the claim is false).

Mis-comprehension and misleading advertising claims

Pragmatic inferences are simple assumptions about statements that are literally true, but figuratively false. A slogan like “Heineken may the best beer in the world” is literally true, because the word ‘may’ means ‘perhaps’ and so they don’t bring it as a fact. This nuance is often lost during information processing by the consumer, who tends to equate ‘may’ with ‘usually’ or ‘is’.

Ad slogans also sometimes omit comparison information, with consumers frequently providing the missing information without being fully aware that they are doing so often in the direction desired by marketers. For example, the slogan “Dentists advise brand X toothpaste” suggests consensus by using a plural form. However, it doesn’t say how many dentists..

Juxtaposition is another means that facilitates certain (sometimes false) inferences. For example, “Be cool, buy brand X”. This suggests a causal relationship, while there actually is none.

Affirmation of the consequent also hinges on reversing cause and effect. For example, “If you can see it, you can make it”. This implies that consumers can build anything they can imagine.

What is meant by elaborative reasoning?

The previous examples of mis-comprehension fall halfway between comprehension and elaborative reasoning. The truth effect may be the result of processes that are largely outside conscious consumer awareness, and some of the inferences that consumers make on the basis of sometimes misleading advertising claims as well. Inferences made during the final stage of elaborative reasoning require full consciousness. Hence, elaborative consumer reasoning is facilitated when consumer involvement is high. Elaborative reasoning is about thinking and thinking can vary along at least three dimensions: the extent of thinking, the valence of thinking and the object of thinking. The present overview will focus on the object of thinking. Types of thought that have been studied in the consumer domain are item-specific versus relational thoughts, thoughts evoked by salient consumer goals, thoughts about the self and meta-cognitive thoughts.

Self-schema and elaborative reasoning

A self-schema is a cognitive generalization about the self that is comprised of a more or less comprehensive set of traits, values and beliefs that exerts a powerful influence on information processing. It is a key source for inference making. Product information contained in advertising that is congruent with a salient self-schema motivates consumers to process the information in more detail.

Information processing with regard to the self increases the extent of elaborative reasoning, for example when processing strong arguments with regard to the self, although these effects can be offset when processing motivation is reduced or when information processing reaches a satiation point and irritation sets in. A salient self-schema can bias information processing in line with the schema, frequently in order to protect or enhance the self.

Elaborative reasoning can result in either increased or decreased persuasion as a result of the quality of the argumentation in the ad the consumer is exposed to. Then the train of thought might move the consumer away from the advocated position.

Consumer meta-cognition

A specific type of elaborative reasoning occurs when the object of consumer thoughts is not the product, ad or brand, but the thoughts themselves. Reflecting on your own inner states, and infer something from that process is called meta-cognition. Consumers thinking about the motives of marketers and the mis-attribution of hedonic fluency, can be considered meta-cognitive experiences, since these are judgments that are based on how they perceive information and the extent and direction to which they think about their own judgment and evaluation processes and those of others.

People’s beliefs about their own mental states and the mental states, strategies, of others as these pertain directly to the social domain of marketplace interactions is also referred to as ‘marketplace meta-cognition.

Ease of retrieval is the apparent ease with which product and brand related information can be retrieved from memory. It is a form of hedonic fluency. Information that is easy to retrieve may positively affect product attitudes because people may conclude that what they can easily remember must be correct.

So when a consumer is asked to think of 10 reasons why he should buy a BMW and finds this difficult, his attitude towards BMW is less favorable than when he only has to come up with one reason, which is easier. Meta-cognition is often influential in consumer judgment because consumers appear to consider these inferences as diagnostic and trustworthy.

Self-validation reflects the subjective confidence consumers have in their thoughts and evaluations in response to persuasive messages. Increasing consumer confidence in positive thoughts and high credible sources enhance advertisement effectiveness and vice versa.