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Attitudes and
How to Change Them
CHAPTER OBJECTIVES When you finish reading this chapter, you should be able to:
6- 1 Explain the functions and components of attitudes in consumer behavior. 6- 2 Describe the ways in which we form attitudes. 6- 3 Explain how persuasion is an active attempt to create or change attitudes.
6- 4 Discuss the ways in which the source, the message, and the medium are used to craft persuasion strategies.
A
lex is hanging out at the mall, idly texting some friends about some stuff she saw in a few stores. When she checks her Snapchat, she sees several friends are posting about their college application plans. She groans to herself; it’s starting already! She’s just begin- ning her senior year of high school, and already everybody’s thinking about what happens next year. Alex realizes it’s time to bite the bullet and really start to investigate this, but it’s all so confusing. She’s been getting bombarded with enticing ads and brochures from so many different schools. They’re hard to escape; some arrive by snail mail and others keep hitting her with emails and texts. A few have invited her to take virtual campus tours on their websites, and one even wants her to enter a virtual world version of the campus as an avatar to walk around and “talk” to current students. It’s amazing to see how different their pitches are, too. Sure, some universities tout their academic excellence, but others play up their international programs, job placement programs, and even amenities (rock climbing walls!). Of course, she’s familiar with some of the schools that are starting to court her, and she already has a positive attitude toward a few—and based on what she’s heard about some others, she already knows it’s “... over my dead body am I going there.” But others feel like a blank slate; so far at least, she has absolutely no idea what it would be like to be a student at these schools. As Alex starts to post some queries in her network to see what people can tell her about these options, she knows it’s time to buckle up—this is going to be an intense year.
Source: DragonImages/Alamy Stock Photo.
Chapter 6 • Attitudes and How to Change Them 155
The Power of Attitudes
People use the term attitude in many contexts. A friend might ask you, “What is your attitude toward recycling?” A parent might scold, “Young man, I don’t like your attitude.” Some bars even euphemistically refer to happy hour as “an attitude adjustment period.” For our purposes, though, an attitude is a lasting, general evaluation of people (including oneself), objects, advertisements, or issues.^1 We call anything toward which one has an attitude an attitude object (A ). o As Alex will learn during her college search process (and no doubt you did too), we assimilate information from a variety of sources and often put a lot of effort into forming an attitude toward many things, including a complex attitude object like a university. An attitude is lasting because it tends to endure over time. It is general because it applies to more than a momentary event, such as hearing a loud noise, though you might, over time, develop a negative attitude toward all loud noises. Consumers have attitudes toward a wide range of attitude objects, from product-specific behaviors (e.g., you use Crest toothpaste rather than Colgate) to more general, consumption- related behaviors (e.g., you enjoy taking bike rides on the weekend). Attitudes help to determine whom you choose to date, what music you listen to, whether you recycle aluminum cans, or whether you choose to become an environmental scientist for a living. In this chapter, we’ll consider the contents of an attitude, how we form attitudes, and how we measure them. We will also review some of the surprisingly complex relationships between attitudes and behavior and then take a closer look at how marketers can change these attitudes.
Attitudes (Generally) Guide our Behavior
If you like chocolate, you’re more likely to eat it. The reason attitudes matter is that they guide our behaviors (see Figure 6.1). The psychologist Daniel Katz developed the functional theory of attitudes to explain how attitudes facilitate behavior.^2 According to this pragmatic approach, attitudes exist because they serve some
Figure 6.1 Model of Persuasion -> Attitude -> Behavior
Persuasion: Process of forming or changing someone’s attitude
Persuasive processes:
- Central (slow, rational) vs. Peripheral (fast, emotional) processes (ELM)
- Narrative persuasion Persuasive communication factors:
- Source
- Message (types of appeals)
- Medium: increasingly advertainment
Comprised of cognitions and emotions Usually positive or negative Has explicit and implicit elements Attitude-Behaviorlink depends on: Attitude commitment Social context (Norms; Social Pressure)
Attitude: Lasting, general evaluation of an attitude object (person, brand, product, message, issue)
Consumer Behavior
Persuasion (forms/changes)^ Attitude (guides) Behavior
OBJECTIVE 6- Explain the functions and components of attitudes in consumer behavior.
Chapter 6 • Attitudes and How to Change Them 157
attitudes are created equal: Some are “hot” in that they’re driven by emotional reac- tions, while others are “cool” because they form based on the knowledge a customer believes they have about the product.
“I Know It”: Cognitive Focus
Cognitive models of attitudes focus primarily on the beliefs (accurate or not) we hold about a product. Making sure your customers have correct information about what you sell is crucial—and even more so in this age of misinformation, where it’s very easy for a rival or even a mischievous consumer to disseminate falsehoods. Because our beliefs about things like universities can be complex, marketing researchers may use multiattribute attitude models to understand them. This type of model assumes that consumers’ attitudes toward an attitude object ( A (^) o )depend on the beliefs they have about several of its attributes. When we use a multiattribute model, we assume that we can identify these specific beliefs and combine them to derive a measure of the consumer’s overall attitude. We’ll describe how these models work with the example of a consumer like Alex at the beginning of the chapter who evalu- ates a complex attitude object that should be familiar to you: a college. Basic multiattribute models contain three specific elements:^4
- Attributes^ are characteristics of the^ A^ o .A researcher tries to identify the attributes that most consumers use when they evaluate the A (^) o .For example, one of a college’s attributes is its scholarly reputation. - Beliefs^ are cognitions about the specific A o (usually relative to others like it). A belief measure assesses the extent to which the consumer perceives that a brand possesses a particular attribute. For example, a student might believe that the University of North Carolina is strong academically. - Importance weights^ reflect the relative priority of an attribute to the consumer. Although people might consider an A o for several attributes, some are likely to be more important than others (i.e., consumers will give them greater weight). Furthermore, these weights are likely to differ across consumers. In the case of colleges and universities, for example, one student might stress research opportu- nities, whereas another might assign greater weight to athletic programs.
The most influential multiattribute model is called the Fishbein Model , named after its primary developer.^5 The model measures three components of attitude:
- Salient beliefs^ people have about an^ A o (i.e., those beliefs about the object a person considers during evaluation). - Object-attribute linkages , or the probability that a particular object has an impor- tant attribute. - Evaluation^ of each of the important attributes.
When we combine these three elements, we compute a consumer’s overall attitude toward an object. (We’ll see later how researchers modify this equation to increase its accuracy.) The basic formula is:
A (^) jk = ∑ β ijk I ik
where
i =attribute j =brand k =consumer
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I =the importance weight given attribute i by consumer k β = consumer k ’s belief regarding the extent to which brand j possesses attribute i A =a particular consumer’s ( k ’s) attitude score for brand j
We obtain the overall attitude score ( A ) when we multiply consumers’ rating of each attribute for all the brands they considered by the importance rating for that attribute. To see how this basic multiattribute model works, let’s suppose we want to predict which college our friend Alex is likely to attend. After months of waiting anxiously, Alex gets accepted by four schools. Because she must now decide among these, we would first like to know which attributes Alex will consider when she forms an attitude toward each school. We can then ask Alex to assign a rating regarding how well each school performs on each attribute and determine the relative importance of the attributes to her. By summing scores on each attribute (after we weigh each by its relative importance), we compute an overall attitude score for each school. Table6.1 shows these hypothetical ratings. Based on this analysis, it seems that Alex has the most favorable attitude toward Smith. She is clearly someone who would like to attend a college for women with a solid academic reputation rather than a school that offers a strong athletic program or a party atmosphere.
Marketing Applications of the Multiattribute Model
Suppose you were the director of marketing for Northland College, another school Alex considered. How might you use the data from this analysis to improve your image?
Capitalize on relative advantage. If prospective students view one brand as supe- rior on a particular attribute, a marketer needs to convince consumers like Alex that this attribute is important. For example, although Alex rates Northland’s social atmo- sphere highly, she does not believe this attribute is a valued aspect for a college. As Northland’s marketing director, you might emphasize the importance of an active social life, varied experiences, or even the development of future business contacts that a student forges when they make strong college friendships.
Beliefs (B) Attribute (i ) Importance (I ) Warren Ivy State Northland Academic reputation 6 8 9 6 3 All women 7 9 3 3 3 Cost 4 2 2 6 9 Proximity to home 3 2 2 6 9 Athletics 1 1 2 5 1 Party atmosphere 2 1 3 7 9 Library facilities 5 7 9 7 2 Attitude score 163 142 153 131
TABLE 6.1 The Basic Multiattribute Model: Alex’s College Decision
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messages are especially persuasive when they involve outcomes the person will experience shortly as opposed to those that involve a longer time frame. 9
Emotions Rule Our Brains: Neuromarketing
How can we measure and detect affect-based attitudinal responses? Some corporations, including Google, CBS, Disney, and Frito-Lay, have teamed up with neuroscientists to find out. 10 The emerging field of neuromarketing uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (or fMRI), a brain-scanning device that tracks blood flow as we perform mental tasks, to take an up-close look at how our brains respond to marketing messages and product design features. In recent years, researchers have discovered that regions in the brain, such as the amygdala, the hippocampus, and the hypothalamus, are dynamic switchboards that blend memory, emotions, and biochemical triggers. These interconnected neurons shape the ways that fear, panic, exhilaration, and social pressure influence our choices. Scientists know that specific regions of the brain light up in these scans to show increased blood flow when a person recognizes a face, hears a song, makes a choice, or senses deception. Now they hope to harness this technology to measure consumers’ reactions to movie trailers, automo- biles, the appeal of a pretty face, and even their loyalty to specific brands. DaimlerChrysler took brain scans of men as they looked at photos of cars and confirmed that sports cars activated their reward centers. The company’s scientists found that the most popular vehicles—the Porsche- and Ferrari- style sports cars—triggered activity in a section of the brain they call the fusiform face area , which governs facial recognition. A psychiatrist who ran the study commented, “They were reminded of faces when they looked at the cars. The lights of the cars look a little like eyes.”
Oops! Attitudes Aren’t as Simple
as We Thought
Complicated concepts like attitudes don’t always fit into the neat little boxes we would like them to. As we learn more about attitudes and their impact on behavior, we find some “messy” factors to keep in mind, such as:
- Ambivalence : You might “love” your smartphone (and keep it with you 24/7), but why does it insist on sending you annoying messages when you’re trying to concentrate on your accounting homework? Generally, attitudes have a valence : They range from strongly negative to strongly positive. But there are many products, brands, and services toward which we hold both positive and negative views. When this happens, we experience attitudinal ambivalence : A sense of being torn or mixed about an attitude object, because both positive and negative components of our attitudes are simultaneously accessible.^11 - Explicit and implicit elements :^ Explicit attitudes^ are those that consumers are conscious of. But we also hold more difficult-to-detect implicit attitudes , those that occur outside of our awareness but still have a big impact on what we think, say, or do. This may be due to a social desirability bias —a conscious effort to report only attitudes that are deemed socially acceptable while keeping your “real” feelings buried.^12 This bias can be a headache for marketing researchers who try to measure consumers’ “real” feelings about unpopular topics or products.
Neuromarketing techniques rely on sophisticated devices like the fMRI to understand how our brains respond to marketing messages. Source: James Steidl/Shutterstock.
Chapter 6 • Attitudes and How to Change Them 161
- Social pressure : Admit it—you’ve said or done something in the past that didn’t totally reflect your actual attitude because of the social pressure to conform to what others say or do. Join the club! We’re often acutely aware of normative influences —what we believe other people think we should do. In a classic demon- stration of “do as I say, not as I do,” many studies report a low correlation between a person’s reported attitude toward something and actual behavior toward it. Hence the popular expression, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
An Improved Fishbein Model to the Rescue:
The Theory of Reasoned Action
So, what makes it more likely that we’ll see a firm linkage between attitudes and behavior? Researchers tinkered with the Fishbein model to improve its predictive ability. They call the newer version the Theory of Reasoned Action.^16 This model contains several important additions to the original, and although the model is still not perfect, it does a better job of prediction. 17 Let’s look at some of the modifications to this model via Alex’s college choice. You saw in Table 6.1 that one of her criteria was a school near home. However, if she felt that this choice would be unpopular (perhaps her friends would think she was too immature), she might ignore or downgrade this preference when she made her decision. Researchers added a new element, the subjective norm (SN) , to account for the effects of what we believe other people think we should do. They use two factors to measure SN: (1) the intensity of a normative belief (NB) that others believe we should take or not take some action and (2) the motivation to comply (MC) with that belief (i.e., the degree to which the consumer takes others’ anticipated reactions into account when they evaluate a purchase).
Buying, Having, Being
Take Your Medicine! The (in)consistency between atti- tudes and behavior links to a major public health problem: medication adherence. This term describes the extent to which people fill and take prescribed medicines. Although some patients unfortunately don’t adhere to prescriptions because they can’t afford them, many simply forget to swallow their pills. This breakdown between attitudes and behavior threatens many people’s health, and it also adds huge costs to the healthcare system. An indus- try study estimates it costs U.S. taxpayers $290 billion annually. 13 The CVS chain found that even for chronic diseases, one-third of their customers stopped taking their prescribed medicine after a month, and half stopped after a year. CVS aggressively reminds people to fill their prescriptions with texts, emails, and phone calls.^14 More generally, healthcare companies spend over $3 billion per year on hardware and software solutions to remind patients about their prescriptions. 15
CVS tries to increase medication adherence by including a reminder function in its app. Source: Patti McConville/Alamy Stock Photo.
Chapter 6 • Attitudes and How to Change Them 163
decided to change its flavor formula to meet the needs of younger consumers who often preferred a sweeter taste (more characteristic of Pepsi). The company conducted rigorous blind taste tests that showed people who didn’t know what brands they were drinking preferred the flavor of the new formula. Much to its surprise, when New Coke hit the shelves, the company faced a consumer revolt as die-hard Coke fans protested. This allegiance to Coke was obviously more than a minor taste preference for these people; the brand was intertwined with their social identities and took on intense patriotic and nostalgic properties. You don’t mess with internalized attitudes!
The Consistency Principle
Have you ever heard someone say, “Pepsi is my favorite soft drink. It tastes terrible,” or “I love my boyfriend. He’s the biggest idiot I’ve ever met”? Probably not (at least until the couple gets married!), because these beliefs or evaluations don’t go together. According to the principle of cognitive consistency , we value harmony among our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and a need to maintain uniformity among these elements motivates us. This desire means that, if necessary, we change our thoughts, feelings, or behaviors to make them consistent with other experiences. That boyfriend may slip up and act like a moron occasionally, but his partner (eventually) will find a way to forgive him—or dump him. The consistency principle is an important reminder that we don’t form our attitudes in a vacuum: A big factor is how well they fit with other, related attitudes we already hold. Sometimes we jump through hoops to justify our desires. For example, researchers find that promotions such as price discounts, rebates, coupons, and loyalty rewards are more effective for hedonic purchases than for utilitarian purchases. Why? Because it is more difficult to defend buying something just because it makes us feel good rather than something we need. These promotions provide the guilt-reducing justification we require to splurge on such items.^22 We’ve already reviewed this phenomenon in Chapter 5, when we learned about the theory of cognitive dissonance. We saw that when a person is confronted with inconsistencies among attitudes or behaviors, they will take some action to resolve this “dissonance”; perhaps they will change their attitude or modify their behavior to restore consistency. The theory has important ramifications for consumer behavior. We often confront situations in which there is some conflict between our attitudes toward a product or service and what we do or buy.^23 According to the theory, our motivation to reduce the negative feelings of dissonance makes us find a way for our beliefs and feelings to fit together. The theory focuses on situations in which two cognitive elements clash. A cognitive element is something a person believes about themselves, a behavior they perform, or an observa- tion about their surroundings. For example, the two cognitive elements “I know vaping causes cancer” and “I vape” are dissonant with one another. This psychological incon- sistency creates a feeling of discomfort that the smoker tries to reduce. The magnitude of dissonance depends on both the importance and number of dissonant elements. 24 In other words, we’re more likely to observe dissonance in high-involvement situations where there is more pressure to reduce inconsistencies. We reduce dissonance when we eliminate, add, or change elements. A person can stop smoking ( eliminating ) or remember Great-Aunt Sophie who smoked until the day she died at age 95 ( adding ). Alternatively, they might question the research that links cancer and vaping ( changing ), perhaps by believing industry-sponsored studies that try to refute this connection.
164 Section 3 • Buying and Having: Choosing and Using Products
Balance Theory
Have you ever heard the expression, “Any friend of Joe’s is a friend of mine?” How about “My enemy’s enemy is my friend?” Balance theory considers how people perceive relations among different attitude objects, and how they alter their attitudes so that these remain consistent (or “balanced”).^25 Balance theory is like the principle of cognitive consistency. A balance theory perspective involves relations (always from the perceiver’s subjective point of view) among three elements, so we call the resulting attitude structures triads. Each triad contains (1) a person and their perceptions of (2) an attitude object and (3) some other person or object. The theory specifies that we want relations among elements in a triad to be harmonious. If they are unbalanced, this creates tension that we are motivated to reduce by changing our perceptions to restore balance. We link elements together in one of two ways: They can have either a unit rela- tion , where we think that a person is somehow connected to an attitude object (some- thing like a belief), or they can have a sentiment relation , where a person expresses liking or disliking for an attitude object. To see how balance theory might work, consider the following scenario:
- Chris would like to date Dan, who is in their consumer behavior class. In balance theory terms, Chris has a positive sentiment relation with Dan. - One day, Dan shows up in class wearing an earring. Dan has a^ positive unit rela- tion with the earring. - Men who wear earrings are a turnoff to Chris. They have a negative sentiment relation with men’s earrings.
According to balance theory, Chris faces an unbalanced triad. As Figure6. shows, they will experience pressure to restore balance by altering some aspect of the triad. How can they do this? Chris could decide that they do not like Dan after
Figure 6.2 Balance Theory Source: Zizi_mentos/Shutterstock.
Chris
Dan
Dan
Chris
Dan
Chris
UNBALANCED TRIAD
BALANCED TRIADS
Chris
Dan
Earring Earring
Earring
Earring
Buying, Having, Being
Basking in Reflected Glory Consumers often like to publicize their connections with successful people or organizations (no matter how shaky the connection) to enhance their own standing. Researchers call this tactic basking in reflected glory. A series of studies at Arizona State University (ASU) showed how students’ desires to identify with a winning image—in this case, ASU’s football team—influenced their consumption behaviors. After the team played a game each weekend, observers recorded the incidence of school- related items, such as ASU T-shirts and caps that students walking around campus wore. The researchers correlated the frequency of these behaviors to the team’s performance. If the team won on Saturday, students were more likely to show off their school affiliation (basking in reflected glory) the following Monday than if the team lost. And the bigger the point spread, the more likely researchers were to observe students who wore clothes with the ASU logo.^26
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Sell the Steak or the Sizzle?:
The Elaboration Likelihood Model
As we saw in Chapter 5, consumers’ level of involvement determines which cognitive processes will activate when they receive a message. This in turn influences which aspects of a communication they process. Like travelers who come to a fork in the road, they choose one path or the other. The direction they take determines which aspects of the marketing communication will work and which will fall on deaf ears. The Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) assumes that, under conditions of high involvement (system 2 processing), we take the central route to persuasion (“the steak”). In this scenario, we prioritize cognitive information as we strive to learn as much as we can to make a smart choice. But under conditions of low involvement (system 1 processing), we take a peripheral route instead. Here, we tend to focus on the “sizzle”: the more superficial components of a brand, such as its packaging, who endorses it, or the emotions it arouses in us that (we believe) will tell us quickly whether it’s something that we want. Figure 6.3 diagrams the ELM model.^28 The harsh truth: Most of us aren’t that motivated to pay attention to most persuasion attempts we receive. Furthermore,as we saw way back in Chapter 3, our poor overworked brains probably couldn’t make sense of a lot of this even if we wanted to. So, it’s fair to say that we process many or even most advertising messages peripherally rather than centrally. Let’s dig into this a bit more.
Fast Persuasion: The Peripheral Route
We take the well-travelled peripheral route when we’re not really motivated to think in depth about the marketer’s arguments. Instead, we’re likely to use other cues to decide how to react to the message. These cues include the product’s package, the attractiveness of the source, and the context in which the message appears. We call sources of information extraneous to the actual message peripheral cues because they surround the actual message.
Figure 6.3 The Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) of Persuasion
Behavior Change
Belief and Attitude Change
Cognitive Responses
PERIPHERAL ROUTE (more affective process)
Belief Change
Behavior Change
Attitude Change
CENTRAL ROUTE (more cognitive process)
FAST PERSUASION (system 1)
SLOW PERSUASION (system 2)
Likelihood to elaborate?
Low High
EXPOSURE TO A MESSAGE
Chapter 6 • Attitudes and How to Change Them 167
The peripheral route to persuasion highlights the paradox of low involvement : When we don’t care as much about a product, the way it’s presented (e.g., who endorses it or the visuals that go with it) increases in importance. The implication here is that we may buy low-involvement products chiefly because the marketer designs a “sexy” package, chooses a popular spokesperson, or creates a stimulating shopping environment. In other words, especially when a consumer engages in emotional or behavioral decision making, these environmental cues become more important than when they perform cognitive decision making; as a result, they look more carefully at the product’s performance or other objective attributes. Marketers are just beginning to explore the effects of this type of incidental brand exposure, where subtle cues in the environment influence our reactions—even when we’re unaware of the cause! We’ll get into this process in more detail in Chapter 9, but for now, here are a few examples of the overlooked power of peripheral cues:
- People in a room who were exposed to a sign of the brand name “Apple” provided responses on an unrelated task that were more unique compared with those who saw a sign with the IBM brand name.^29 - College students who used a “cute” ice cream scoop to help themselves to ice cream took a larger amount than those who used a plain scoop; the researchers explained that the whimsical object drove them to be more self-indulgent even though they weren’t aware of this effect.^30 - Some students scored higher on difficult Graduate Record Examination questions when they took the test using a Massachusetts Institute of Technology pen, and they delivered a better athletic performance when they drank water from a Gatorade cup during strenuous exercise.^31 - E-cigarettes in music videos create more positive attitudes toward e-cigarettes among youth: Compared with participants who watched music videos with images of vaping removed, those who saw videos with images of vaping were more likely to want to use e-cigarettes in the future.^32
Slow Persuasion: The Central Route
An expectant mother who hears a radio message that warns about drinking while pregnant might say to herself, “They’re right. I really should stop drinking alcohol now that I’m pregnant.” Or she might offer a counterargument , such as, “That’s a bunch of baloney. My mother had a cocktail every night when she was pregnant with me, and I turned out fine.” If people generate counterarguments in response to a message, it’s less likely that they will yield to the message, whereas if they generate further supporting arguments, it’s more likely they’ll comply.^33 According to the ELM, when we find the information in a persuasive message relevant or interesting, we pay careful attention to it. We focus on the arguments the marketer presents and process this content cognitively. These counterarguments may take the form of reasons why what the message is saying is wrong or doesn’t apply to you. We can think of these arguments as part of our cognitive defenses, or our natural tendency to refute messages that try to persuade us.^34 To recap, the basic idea of the ELM is that involved consumers who are moti- vated to engage in elaboration look for the “steak” (e.g., strong, rational arguments). Those who are less involved and not inclined to elaborate on the message very much go for the “sizzle” (e.g., the colors and images in packaging or famous people’s endorsements). It is important to remember, however, that the same communications variable can be both a central and a peripheral cue, depending on its relation to the attitude object. The physical attractiveness of a model might serve as a peripheral cue in a car commercial, but their beauty might be a central cue for a product such as shampoo, where a major product benefit is to enhance attractiveness. 35
Chapter 6 • Attitudes and How to Change Them 169
Media literacy is especially important for those who have not yet developed critical skills, such as children. A research program the National Institutes of Health funded to correct the influence of alcohol messages that are prevalent in the content of TV shows popular with youth illustrates one attempt to help young consumers develop persuasion knowledge.^42 Hoping to bypass otherwise stringent regulations on advertising their products, alcohol advertisers often revert to product placements in these shows. This strategy capitalizes on the narrative persuasion process we reviewed earlier in this chapter. But consumer advocates and policymakers worry that showing alcohol use in a positive light can lead young people to develop unhealthy attitudes toward drinking. So, in this program, the researchers developed TV episodes that emphasized the social benefits of drinking—but they also created a one-minute epilogue in which one of the lead characters told viewers that what they see on TV is “not real” and that alcohol can change their behavior for the worst. Overall, the epilogues were effective at countering the influence of the TV episode, but they were especially effective among those viewers who were highly transported in the story and who reported high levels of persuasion knowledge. The high level of narrative transportation made them pay more attention to what the TV characters had to say, including in the epilogue, while activation of the persuasion knowledge allowed them to be more critical and thus less accepting of the drinking message.
Disclosures and Warnings: Do They Work?
A recent meta-analysis of all types of disclosures and warning found consistent evidence that disclosures are effective at activating persuasion knowledge, generating more critical processing, and in turn increasing resistance to persuasive attempts. 43 Of course, one size does not fit all when it comes to warnings. Although they are designed to activate persuasion knowledge, they can also backfire by bringing attention to the product being advertised. But wait, it’s not that simple (surprise!). New research shows that in this day and age of constant and often obvious attempts to persuade, consumers use persuasion knowledge differently. Instead of skepticism and rejection of the message, they may simply search for a more credible source. 44 In some cases, they admire the source for their skills at persuasion and view these attempts positively! So, whereas conventional wisdom is that persuasion knowledge is always a bad thing, this research shows that boosting consumers’ persuasion knowledge in fact helps the marketer by making consumers evaluate the marketer more positively. Have you ever interacted with a talented salesperson who can get you to buy those jeans and instead of being more critical of them, you are quite impressed with their skills?
Crafting Persuasive
Communications Strategies
The communications model in Figure 6.4 captures all the elements marketers need to consider when they want to connect with their customers:
- One of these is a source , where the communication originates. - Another is the^ message^ itself. There are many ways to say something, and the structure of the message has a significant effect on how we perceive it.
OBJECTIVE 6- Discuss the ways in which the source, the message, and the medium are used to craft persuasion strategies.
170 Section 3 • Buying and Having: Choosing and Using Products
- The message is conveyed via a^ medium , which could be TV, a social media post, radio, magazines, billboards, personal contact, or even a matchbook cover. - One or more^ receivers^ interpret the message considering their own experiences. - Finally, the source receives^ feedback^ so that the marketer can use receivers’ reac- tions to modify aspects of the message as necessary. - In today’s dynamic world of interactivity, there are also many elements of consumer-to-consumer exchanges around the source, the message, and the medium. We will discuss these social processes more fully in Chapter 11.
Decisions, Decisions: Tactical Communications Options
Suppose Audi wants to create an advertising campaign for a new ragtop it targets to young drivers. As it plans this campaign, the automaker must develop a message that will arouse desire for the car. To craft persuasive messages that might persuade someone to buy this car instead of the many others available, we must answer several questions:
- Who will drive the car in the ad? A NASCAR driver? A career woman? A reality show star? The source of a message helps determine whether consumers will accept it. - How should we construct the message? Should it emphasize the negative con- sequences of being left out when others drive cool cars and you still tool around in your old clunker? Should it directly compare the car with others already on the market, or maybe present a fantasy in which a high-powered but overworked executive abruptly decided to leave a boring meeting to cruise down the highway in their Audi? - What media should we use? Should the ad run in a magazine? Should we air it on TV? Sell the product door-to-door? Post the material on Instagram or create a Facebook group? Convince bloggers on popular sites like Justacarguy.com or Carscoops.com to write about it? 45 If we do produce a print ad, should we run it in the pages of Vogue? Good Housekeeping? Car and Driver? Sometimes where you
Figure 6.4 21 st^ Century Communications Model
Medium
Source Message
Consumer
Consumer
Consumer
Consumer
Consumer
Consumer
172 Section 3 • Buying and Having: Choosing and Using Products
Source credibility is an incredibly important factor in advertising, where celebs of all stripes hawk products and services. On the other hand, some subtle cues can diminish credibility: Consider for example those superfast disclaimers you often hear at the end of a commercial message that supply additional information the advertiser is required to provide (“possible side effects may include nausea, diarrhea, or death”). Although people tend to assume that people who speak faster are more intelligent, they may trust them less. When consumers don’t already have a positive attitude toward a product, a fast-paced disclaimer leads them to think the advertiser has ulterior motives and they trust the company less. 52 Source credibility also suffers if consumers perceive that the source is biased.^53 Knowledge bias implies that a source’s knowledge about a topic is not accurate. Reporting bias occurs when a source has the required knowledge, but we question their willingness to convey it accurately—as when a racket manufacturer pays a star tennis player to use its products exclusively. The source’s credentials might be appropriate, but the fact that consumers see the expert as a “hired gun” compromises believability. The issue of source credibility has never been more important than it is today when an explosion of fake news — hoaxes spread by hackers or other outsiders—has caused many people to question the trustworthiness of even the most respected traditional and social media outlets. Programs to disseminate false information have taken their toll on the American public; nearly two-thirds of Americans believe the mainstream media publish fake news. Indeed, in a recent survey among 92,000 news consumers in 46 countries, the United States ranked dead last in media trust.^54 Although in general more positive sources tend to increase attitude change, there are exceptions to this rule. Sometimes we can think a source is obnoxious, yet it is still effective. For example, most Americans hate negative political ads, yet such ads are widespread. Twenty years ago, a law was passed that required politicians to place their endorsement on all ads that they run: “My name is _____, and I approve this message.” Yet recent research shows that this law could have unintended consequences by making negative ads more effective. In the study, the researchers showed participants eight political ads, half from Democrats and half from Republicans, all from late 2000s U.S. Senate races. 56 They used different types of ads—policy attack, character attack, policy positive, and character positive—and manipulated whether the participants also saw the candidate’s endorsement at the end. They measured how much participants perceived the candidate as credible, believable, and trustworthy, and then measured their attitudes toward each candidate. They found clear evidence that the endorsements boosted the evaluations of policy-focused attack ads—but not those ads that were positive or character-focused. The researchers concluded that the endorsement made the ad content seem truer and more credible. In some instances, the differences in attitude change between positive sources and less positive sources diminish over time. After a while, people appear to “forget” about the negative source and change their attitudes anyway. We call this process the sleeper effect.^57
Facebook’s credibility was damaged when it came out that purveyors of fake news had bought huge amounts of advertis- ing on the platform and that the company allowed advertisers to target very specific racial groups. Facebook is scrambling to repair the damage. It now offers a “Related Articles” tool so that readers can consult other sources to acquire more context about a story and reduce the frequency with which people share hoaxes. Even so, the ability of almost anyone to create a doctored video or to post a story that looks “authentic” creates a very big problem, and not just for politicians: Marketers now must contend with even greater skepticism among consumers about whether what they read about product claims is fake news as well.^55 Source: BigNazik/Shutterstock.
Chapter 6 • Attitudes and How to Change Them 173
Source Attractiveness: “What Is Beautiful Is Good”
Source attractiveness refers to the social value recipients attribute to a communicator. This value relates to the person’s physical appearance, personality, social status, or similarity to the receiver (we like to listen to people who are like us). No wonder that many organizations are willing to pay top dollar to communicators who can get the job done.
Is Beauty Only Skin Deep?
Some sources appeal to us because they are cool, brainy, or just plain famous (Kardashians, anyone?). But many just are nice to look at. Almost everywhere we turn, beautiful people try to persuade us to buy or do something.As we’ll see in Chapter 9, our society places a high premium on physical attractiveness. We assume that good-looking people are smarter, hipper, and happier than the rest of us. This is an example of a halo effect , which occurs when we assume that persons who rank high on one dimension excel on others as well. We can explain this effect in terms of the consistency principle we discussed previously in this chapter; we are more comfortable when all our judgments about a person correspond.
Star Power: Celebrities as Communications Sources
Which celeb’s products are you using today? Maybe you’re wearing Kim Kardashian shapewear under Nicole Richie sleepwear and resting your head on an Ellen DeGeneres pillow. How about a sip of Drake champagne, Chainsmokers tequila, or Post Malone rosé—or perhaps you prefer to roll Snoop Dogg cannabis in Wiz Khalifa papers, then discard your ashes in a receptable custom- designed by actor Seth Rogen.^58 Many big-time marketers pay big bucks to secure celebrity endorsements; they hope that the star’s popularity will transfer to their product, or perhaps even discourage harmful behavior like excessive drug or cigarette use.^59 Celebrities hawk everything from grills (George Foreman) to perfumes (Jennifer Lopez). As our earlier discussion about the consistency principle illustrates, these messages are more effective when there’s a logical connection between the star and the product. When Bob Dylan pitches Victoria’s Secret lingerie (yes, he really did), marketers may need to reread their consumer behavior textbook. 60 Then again, Justin Bieber puts his name on almost everything... including nail polish! 61 There is no doubt that celebrity endorsements are still very popular: Current estimates indicate that about 20 to 25 percent of all ads worldwide rely on this strategy.^62 But do celebrity endorsements work? A meta-analysis of 46 studies through 2016 finds that celebrity endorsements do not (1) increase awareness of a product or brand, (2) boost attitude toward the ad itself, and (3) make people more likely to purchase the item. But they do make people like the product more.^63 And this tactic often pays off financially—brands that employ celebrity endorsers often see a jump in their stock prices.^64
Marketers hope that a star’s popularity will transfer to their product. Source: Bastian/Agencja Fotograficzna Caro/Alamy Stock Photo.
