Marketing Communication
Summary of lectures by Mrs. A. Bosmans - 2019
MSc Marketing Management
Eline van de Ven
,Lecture 2
Create awareness
Q: Why are the following ads and campaigns such a
success in “breaking through the advertising clutter”?
- Duracell Bunny Campaigns
- Pringles smart communication strategy:
packaging
- Maes: Find the Maes barrel
A:
- Duracell:
o You elaborate your network and confront people with new information. This new
information receives more information than old information. Duracell used a second
commercial (holiday, cold, skiing). It will be recognized/recalled better due to that.
o It builds an associative network (Duracell & bunny)
o Increases involuntary attention because it is new information
- Pringles
o Increases involuntary attention because it is different than other chips brands salient
- Maes
o People start talking about it, which increases spatial proximity. Since the barrel is
brought close to you it is concrete.
Consumers have to choose to which advertisements they pay attention (increase involuntary attention
New York Times Square; all advertisements scream for attention.
,Attention
Attention = the reception of “stimuli”. The dimensions are:
- Selective
- Voluntary or involuntary
- Limited (as are the amount of mental resources) (consciously or unconsciously)
- A precondition for further processing
o More attention means more ‘elaboration’
When something is important to you, you consciously give attention to it.
Pre attention Focal attention Comprehension Elaboration
People have limited cognitive capacity to attend to and think about information
- Levels of processing (Greenwald and Heavitt, 1984):
- Pre-attention: little or no capacity required, automatic processing
- Focal-attention: little capacity required
- Comprehension: modest levels of capacity required
- Elaboration: substantial levels of capacity required
- More attention means more capacity to comprehend and elaborate on information
Marketing communication challenges
- Stand out from the crowd
- Can be done by
- Increasing attention (Attention Effect)
- So that more resources are allocated to the stimulus
- Involuntary or voluntary
- Increasing ease of processing (Memory Effect) (make use of existing memory, we can
make sure they remember it)
- So that less resources are needed to comprehend and elaborate on
the stimulus
- Avoiding advertising avoidance
- Consumers actively decide NOT to attend to commercial messages
- Zipping and zapping
- “do not call me” lists (tele-selling)
- Ad blockers
- People learn to actively avoid commercial messages, such as banners and sponsored results
- Ad avoidance is a bigger problem for online compared to offline media
- Information overload: Because consumers usually have specific goals when
browsing, online ads perceived as more intrusive
- Pagendarm & Schaumburg (2001): consumers’ navigation style
matters: Banner blindness is higher when people are looking for
information vs. when they are just browsing
- Selective attention: People train themselves in recognizing commercial messages
(such as banners and sponsored search results), such that they can actively avoid.
,Stimulating involuntary attention
- A number of communication cues can trigger involuntary attention:
- Salient & novel stimuli
- Centrally located stimuli: Horizontal centrality
- Stimuli presented first: Primacy effects
- Picture Superiority: Pictoral vs. text vs. brand
- Automatic orienting response
- Cialdini (2016) calls this “attractors”
1. Salient Stimuli
- novel, unexpected, and original stimuli (Pieters, Warlop, and Wedel 2002)
- related to life and death (Cialdini 2017)
- Sexual stimuli
- Threatening stimuli
- stick out and are hard to ignore
- attract attention involuntary, so that more capacity will be allocated when processing the
corresponding stimulus
- they elicit an orienting response, resulting in
- mild psychological arousal
- physical orientation toward the source of stimulation (i.e., focal attention)
Example (unexpected ads) Example (novel ads) Example (Life and death)
Arousal (state of activation, not sexually) (life and death) can be a mediator:
- A state of wakefulness or alertness
- Affects cognitive capacity
, Yerkes-dodson law^
If you elicit too much fear (they are afraid of something), you can block processing.
Shows that different levels of originality, weirdness, and salience change cognitive capacity.
2. Centered Stimuli: Horizontal centrality
- stimuli in the center receive more attention and are more likely to be chosen
3. Firstly presented stimuli can lead to primacy effects:
- Attention to items presented first in a list is higher
- Golden triangle: users used to look at the first three items and with that form a golden
triangle. Now, users aren’t scanning search engines the way they used to.
- Users spend less time looking at each search result
- While spending less time looking at each result, users look at more results total—
reading farther down the page
- Accordingly, positions lower in the SERP get more attention
Why did it change? The sponsored results on Google used to be presented on
the right side of a webpage, which allowed us to not look at them at all. Now
Google put them on top of the page, which forces us to scan the title or more.
The Golden Triangle is a good example of the primacy effect. However, we
shouldn’t see this as “the big online thing” that we always have to take into
account.
4. Visual stimuli: Picture vs. Text vs. Brand
Pieters & Wedel (2004): analysis of 1363 print ads with eye-tracking technology
- Pictures: attract attention, regardless of their size
- Text: the bigger the text, the more attention
- Brand: the bigger the brand name, the more attention, not only to the brand, but also to
pictures and texts (and no negative effect on overall attention)
- Resource competition: the more attention to the picture or the text, the less attention
goes to the other ad elements
Summary of lectures by Mrs. A. Bosmans - 2019
MSc Marketing Management
Eline van de Ven
,Lecture 2
Create awareness
Q: Why are the following ads and campaigns such a
success in “breaking through the advertising clutter”?
- Duracell Bunny Campaigns
- Pringles smart communication strategy:
packaging
- Maes: Find the Maes barrel
A:
- Duracell:
o You elaborate your network and confront people with new information. This new
information receives more information than old information. Duracell used a second
commercial (holiday, cold, skiing). It will be recognized/recalled better due to that.
o It builds an associative network (Duracell & bunny)
o Increases involuntary attention because it is new information
- Pringles
o Increases involuntary attention because it is different than other chips brands salient
- Maes
o People start talking about it, which increases spatial proximity. Since the barrel is
brought close to you it is concrete.
Consumers have to choose to which advertisements they pay attention (increase involuntary attention
New York Times Square; all advertisements scream for attention.
,Attention
Attention = the reception of “stimuli”. The dimensions are:
- Selective
- Voluntary or involuntary
- Limited (as are the amount of mental resources) (consciously or unconsciously)
- A precondition for further processing
o More attention means more ‘elaboration’
When something is important to you, you consciously give attention to it.
Pre attention Focal attention Comprehension Elaboration
People have limited cognitive capacity to attend to and think about information
- Levels of processing (Greenwald and Heavitt, 1984):
- Pre-attention: little or no capacity required, automatic processing
- Focal-attention: little capacity required
- Comprehension: modest levels of capacity required
- Elaboration: substantial levels of capacity required
- More attention means more capacity to comprehend and elaborate on information
Marketing communication challenges
- Stand out from the crowd
- Can be done by
- Increasing attention (Attention Effect)
- So that more resources are allocated to the stimulus
- Involuntary or voluntary
- Increasing ease of processing (Memory Effect) (make use of existing memory, we can
make sure they remember it)
- So that less resources are needed to comprehend and elaborate on
the stimulus
- Avoiding advertising avoidance
- Consumers actively decide NOT to attend to commercial messages
- Zipping and zapping
- “do not call me” lists (tele-selling)
- Ad blockers
- People learn to actively avoid commercial messages, such as banners and sponsored results
- Ad avoidance is a bigger problem for online compared to offline media
- Information overload: Because consumers usually have specific goals when
browsing, online ads perceived as more intrusive
- Pagendarm & Schaumburg (2001): consumers’ navigation style
matters: Banner blindness is higher when people are looking for
information vs. when they are just browsing
- Selective attention: People train themselves in recognizing commercial messages
(such as banners and sponsored search results), such that they can actively avoid.
,Stimulating involuntary attention
- A number of communication cues can trigger involuntary attention:
- Salient & novel stimuli
- Centrally located stimuli: Horizontal centrality
- Stimuli presented first: Primacy effects
- Picture Superiority: Pictoral vs. text vs. brand
- Automatic orienting response
- Cialdini (2016) calls this “attractors”
1. Salient Stimuli
- novel, unexpected, and original stimuli (Pieters, Warlop, and Wedel 2002)
- related to life and death (Cialdini 2017)
- Sexual stimuli
- Threatening stimuli
- stick out and are hard to ignore
- attract attention involuntary, so that more capacity will be allocated when processing the
corresponding stimulus
- they elicit an orienting response, resulting in
- mild psychological arousal
- physical orientation toward the source of stimulation (i.e., focal attention)
Example (unexpected ads) Example (novel ads) Example (Life and death)
Arousal (state of activation, not sexually) (life and death) can be a mediator:
- A state of wakefulness or alertness
- Affects cognitive capacity
, Yerkes-dodson law^
If you elicit too much fear (they are afraid of something), you can block processing.
Shows that different levels of originality, weirdness, and salience change cognitive capacity.
2. Centered Stimuli: Horizontal centrality
- stimuli in the center receive more attention and are more likely to be chosen
3. Firstly presented stimuli can lead to primacy effects:
- Attention to items presented first in a list is higher
- Golden triangle: users used to look at the first three items and with that form a golden
triangle. Now, users aren’t scanning search engines the way they used to.
- Users spend less time looking at each search result
- While spending less time looking at each result, users look at more results total—
reading farther down the page
- Accordingly, positions lower in the SERP get more attention
Why did it change? The sponsored results on Google used to be presented on
the right side of a webpage, which allowed us to not look at them at all. Now
Google put them on top of the page, which forces us to scan the title or more.
The Golden Triangle is a good example of the primacy effect. However, we
shouldn’t see this as “the big online thing” that we always have to take into
account.
4. Visual stimuli: Picture vs. Text vs. Brand
Pieters & Wedel (2004): analysis of 1363 print ads with eye-tracking technology
- Pictures: attract attention, regardless of their size
- Text: the bigger the text, the more attention
- Brand: the bigger the brand name, the more attention, not only to the brand, but also to
pictures and texts (and no negative effect on overall attention)
- Resource competition: the more attention to the picture or the text, the less attention
goes to the other ad elements
