How Advertising Affects Consumers

1. THE TRADITIONAL VIEW OF HOW HUMAN BEHAVIOR COMES ABOUT

2. A CONTEMPORARY VIEW OF HOW HUMAN BEHAVIOR COMES ABOUT

3. ADVERTISING'S ROLE IN HOW HUMAN BEHAVIOR COMES ABOUT

4. THE REALITY OF MODERN MARKETING

5. REFERENCES

POINT OF VIEW

Advertising, as currently practiced, ignores all that has been learned by cognitive psychologists in the past 30 or 40 years. Consumers process all incoming information, including advertising, in a very complex yet instantaneous manner. Advertising is not a stimulus in the outmoded behavioral psychology stimulus-response model of human information processing. Advertising, if it is attended to at all, is nothing more than a net addition to everything the consumer has previously learned and retained about the brand. The challenge for advertising is to find ways and means to bypass or upset business as usual in the consumer's brain and to build an enduring perceptual representation of the brand as one that is acceptable and desirable.

MARKETERS MAKE LITTLE OR NO ATTEMPT to really understand how consumers process and use the information they receive about brands, including advertising. Instead, marketers routinely make two basic assumptions about how consumers process and use the advertising information that they provide to consumers about their brands:

Assumption 1. Marketers assume they can control what consumers think about brands through marketing communications, especially advertising.

Assumption 2. Marketers assume that brand purchases are made as a direct result of a conscious, rational consumer choice process.

These assumptions ignore the burgeoning new knowledge of how information is processed in the brain that has been and is developing in the domain of cognitive psychology. These assumptions completely ignore the implications of cognitive psychology for marketing practice. Traditionally, marketers have assumed that the primary means of communicating about brands to consumers is through advertising. Other types of marketing communications may reinforce the effects of advertising but if advertising fails to communicate the brand message in the first place, no significant change can have taken place in consumer appreciation of the brand.

To be successful, an advertisement must establish a contact with the consumer in which the consumer consciously attends to the advertising and is, then, influenced by it. This formulation assumes a consumer who is continuously and actively searching for information about products/ services (or brands of products/services) that they buy or may buy so that they can make more informed purchase decisions the next time a conscious purchase "decision" must be made.