ADVERTISING'S ROLE IN HOW HUMAN BEHAVIOR COMES ABOUT

When an advertisement shows up in a consumer's immediate environment, it may or may not be perceived consciously. If it is attended to at all, it will be in the context of whatever the consumer already has retained about the advertised brand and the product category in which it competes. What he already knows about the brand will depend on what he has processed and remembered from previous advertising for it as well as other sponsored marketing communications for it, past experience with the brand (either personal or secondhand as reported by family members, friends, acquaintances, strangers, or impersonal outside evaluators like Consumer Reports), and whatever past information has come to him about the brand from other nonadvertising marketing communications as well as information from other media sources not controlled by the marketer.

In addition to whatever the consumer remembers about the brand from such past exposures, his perception of an advertisement will also depend on several personal habits and attitudes that are part of his general reaction to advertisements, as such:

• continuous screening of incoming messages to sort out those messages that are of no immediate interest

• difference toward and high intolerance for all kinds of intrusive communication

• short attention span once a message is perceived as advertising

• a continuing preoccupation only with self

• an essential disinterest in, if not an aversion to, advertising.

An advertisement--any advertisement-has a very difficult task if it is to capture the perception of a consumer and an even harder time, once perceived, to make a net addition to what the consumer already knows about the brand.

Morton Hunt (Hunt, 1982, p. 157) describes this continuing process of transforming incoming information into a meaningful moment-to-moment reality:

... every human being fashions a world out of the formless tumult and sets each thing in its proper place. Not, of course, in actuality, but in the model of actuality within the mind, where the inane welter of incoming sense impressions is sorted out, shaped, and assembled into a coherent representation of the outer world.

Given this contemporary view of how the brain works, it is surely time for a complete overhaul of traditional views of how advertising works.

Advertisements tend to get lost in the shuffle in the totality of brain activity. They are rarely regarded uniquely, nor attended to as unique informational statements about a brand and then only in the context of whatever has already been stored in memory about that brand. Additionally, whatever, if anything, the consumer does take away from an advertisement, consciously or unconsciously, is immediately amalgamated into everything else the consumer knows about the brand.

The same analysis applies to all the other kinds of sponsored marketing communications and other nonmarketer-sponsored communications that have, over time, formed an individual consumer's perception of the brand.

Morton Hunt (Hunt, 1982, p. 96) has described this process of the absorption of new information into the existing conceptions in the brain:

... in real life, we perceive and remember nearly everything in terms of what we already know--we modify the input and remember not what our senses perceived but what our minds made of it....

What this suggests is that the extent to which we remember a new experience has more to do with how it relates to existing memories than with how many times or how recently we have experienced it, or how much interfering scribble there is.

What is decisive in the consumer mind is the current collection of information it now holds about a brand--sponsored or unsponsored, positive or negative---not the last advertisement to which the consumer was exposed.

To consumer perception, the sources of a sponsored message about a brand-advertising, promotion, direct response, event sponsorship, etc.--is unimportant. Consumers, when exposed to an advertisement for the brand, do not say to themselves, "Oh, here is a new advertisement for Boffo. This is important. I must attend to it." The source of the message may be irrelevant to the consumer. It is whether the message is perceived by the consumer as important or not to him, right now, consciously or unconsciously, that determines whether it finds its way, in whole or in part, into the consumer's basic conception of the brand, along with whatever other prior messages, message fragments, or conceptions about the brand are already there in whatever distorted or amalgamated form.