Summary lectures Attitudes and Advertising

Attitudes and Advertising
Lecture 1: Introduction
What is an attitude?
Do I think an object is good or bad?
But it is not that straightforward.
That is because an attitude is like a science itself, we need to figure it out. There are some things we
can observe, but you have to deduce it. You cannot just use the observed
 cookie = drooling = hence likes the cookie.

An attitude is a hypothetical construct.




How can we measure an attitude?
 Self-report (likert-scale)
o Depending on the question, some people know or do not know their particular
attitude towards a subject.

Do attitudes influence behavior?
 Yes
 No
 Maybe?

How can we change people attitudes?
 Persuasion: changing an attitude
 Compliance/conformity: people just agree
 Internal & external influences
o Attention, memory, mood, etc.
o Culture, context, framing, etc.

… and advertising
Ads  frame for the theories

Advertising functions
- Facilitating competition !
- Funding public mass media and other public resources ?
- Creating jobs ?
- Communicating with consumers about products and services !
- Informing the individual consumer !
- Persuading the individual consumer !

Approaches to advertising
 Naïve: it has been around for a while; therefore, it will be useful.
o Advertising must be effective, simply because it is so ubiquitous and advertising
expenditures are vast and ever increasing.
 Economic: checking whether your advertising works.

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, o Address the effects issue by correlating advertising expenditures with aggregated
changes in sales volume.
 Media: you’re not looking at the success (financial) but at the amount of people you reach.
o Conceptualizes advertising effectiveness in terms of the number of individuals in a
specific target population who have been exposed to a message (i.e., its reach).
 Creative: creative ads are the best, it just works.
o Equates effectiveness with creativity.

The psychological approach
We want to get what people are like  the processes
The psychological approach aims at relating specific advertising stimuli to specific and individual
consumer responses. Moreover, it seeks to articulate the intrapersonal, interpersonal or group-
level psychological processes that are responsible for the relationship between ad stimuli and
consumer responses.
A scientific psychological approach.
Since many so-called advertising techniques are not supported by scientific evidence.

What are the underlying psychological principles?
Ask yourself, not only if it works, but especially why it works.

What are the underlying psychological principles?

Lecture 2: Attitudes
What is an attitude?
1. Evaluative response; it’s something good or bad
2. Directed towards something; towards a particular subject
3. Based on three classes of information; cognitive (beliefs, what you know), affective (how you
feel) & behavior (using behavior to decide whether you like or dislike something)

Cognitive  beliefs, knowledge, expectations, experience.
A new computer, you know all the details (processor speed) and once you use it you realize
what that actually means. It might change your attitude towards it.
Affective  feelings, moods, emotions, experience.
Your feelings towards it. How fast the laptop is and how ‘good’ it looks.
Behavioral  action intentions, actual behavior.
I enjoy going to the movies, apparently I’m into movies. You actually going to the movies
proves this.

Starbucks: you know you have to wait in line because it is busy, you feel annoyed about that and
therefore you almost never go.
If you find yourself going to Starbucks, you like it.

The stability of an attitude fluctuates.
One day positive, the other negative.
 cognitive dissonance

Aspects of disagreement
1. Should attitudes be defined as a predisposition to evaluate an attitude object in a particular
way or as the evaluative response itself?
If you see an attitude of a predisposition, you see it more as a tendency. And hence, needs to
be a consistent thing.

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, 2. Are attitudes stable or context dependent?
As we saw, context dependent.

The unity of attitudes
- Doubtful
- The link between what people say is their attitude and their behavior are weak.
- Explicit and implicit attitudes
o Explicit attitudes: which you are aware of; evaluation of which the individual is
consciously aware and that can be expressed using self-report measures.
 Deliberate
 Conscious
 Introspective (what do I think of this?)
 Slow/cold (requires thinking)
 Self-report
o Implicit attitudes: not as easy to be aware of as the explicit; evaluations of which the
individual is typically not aware and that influence reactions or actions over which
the individual has little or no control.
 Automatic (snap judgements)
 Non-conscious
 Associative (relates to how we measure them; conditioning)
 Fast/hot (associative)
 Indirect measures
- Ambivalence
o Attitude ambivalence: a state in which an individual gives an attitude object
equivalently strong positive and negative evaluation.
 ‘You like a brands clothing, but it’s made by child labor.’
o You can feel both positive and negative things.
o You can know you like or dislike something, hence it is not necessarily implicit

Prejudice  explicit and implicit attitudes may not align here.
In part perhaps due to social norms.

Advertising can make you like something, because you see it so much; conditioning.
You like Coca-Cola (advertising) but at the same time do not like it because of the amount of sugar.
Implicit vs Explicit


Attitude dimension; an attitude cannot be positive and negative at the
same time  one dimension.
Ambivalence shows this is not possible. Hence; we probably need two
dimensions.

Attitude consistency
 cognitive dissonance
People are eager to stay consistent, being inconsistent feels bad.
It’s not a big deal. People are okay with feeling ambivalent as long as
they do not have to act on it. As long as you do not have to make a decision, people are fine with it.
When you are ambivalent, you don’t know what to do.

Dual attitudes: these findings challenge the view of attitudes as a unitary construct.



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