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The Psychology of Advertising
Advertising is a ubiquitous and powerful force, seducing us into buying wanted and sometimes unwanted products and services, donating to charity (even to causes we have not heard of before), voting for political candidates (even of questionable reputation), and changing our health-related lifestyles for better or worse. The impact of advertising is often subtle and implicit, but sometimes blatant and impossible to overlook.
This book discusses key topics from the fields of social and consumer psychology. Important questions are addressed in the volume such as:
What impact does advertising have on consumer behaviour? What causes this impact? What are the psychological processes responsible for the effectiveness of advertising? How do consumers make sense of advertising messages? What messages "get across" and when and why?
This is the first book to offer a comprehensive and state-of-the-art overview of the psychological findings on the impact of advertising, and to discuss this research in the context of recent developments in the fields of social and consumer psychology. It presents and discusses results of both classic and contemporary studies in an engaging style that avoids highly technical language.
The authors have included a glossary of frequently used concepts which assist student comprehension, making it a unique and invaluable volume for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, as well as researchers and lecturers in social psychology, marketing, and communications. It is also a useful resource for professionals working in advertising, public health, public services and political communication.
This book discusses key topics from the fields of social and consumer psychology. Important questions are addressed in the volume such as:
What impact does advertising have on consumer behaviour? What causes this impact? What are the psychological processes responsible for the effectiveness of advertising? How do consumers make sense of advertising messages? What messages "get across" and when and why?
This is the first book to offer a comprehensive and state-of-the-art overview of the psychological findings on the impact of advertising, and to discuss this research in the context of recent developments in the fields of social and consumer psychology. It presents and discusses results of both classic and contemporary studies in an engaging style that avoids highly technical language.
The authors have included a glossary of frequently used concepts which assist student comprehension, making it a unique and invaluable volume for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, as well as researchers and lecturers in social psychology, marketing, and communications. It is also a useful resource for professionals working in advertising, public health, public services and political communication.
344 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2010
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
September 13, 2014
One of the things I’ve been thinking about lately has been advertising and how it influences us. I’ve been reading books on this and have been really underwhelmed. Part of the problem is that for some of these books the assumption seems to be that only children or fools would be influenced by advertising, that it is almost impossible to know why companies keep on spending so much money on advertising, with the clear implication that if business had any sense, they probably wouldn’t bother.
This is, of course, utter nonsense. There is just about no chance that international corporations would waste billions of dollars on something unless they absolutely had to and it worked a treat.
Part of the reason for this mismatch of theory and practice is that there is a very strong positivist / economics leaning to some of the stuff I’ve been reading about advertising – and these ideas are more or less premised on the belief in the economically rational individual who seeks to do what they can to maximise their advantage and the utility of their resources. Over the last few years I’ve done quite a bit of reading around behavioural economics – for want of a better term – which has discussed some of the problems associated with the purely rational individual, 'homo-economicus' as some people refer to them – and how we are systematically likely to behave in ways that are clearly opposed to our own best interests. That is pretty much what I was after – a book that would bring together the work that has been done on these kinds of studies and how that work has been used by the advertising industry.
There has never really been all that much doubt in my mind that the advertising industry wouldn’t be using the flaws in our decision-making systems against us – so I was surprised that so many of the books I’ve been reading have sounded like the kinds of psychology you might read in the 1950s, essentially, behaviourist very much in the old sense. I've also been a bit surprised at how few of the examples in behavioural economics texts have spoken about advertising.
So this book came as a welcome relief. They even say at the start that the reason why they put this book together was that there simply weren’t any books on this stuff available – which is a good thing, as I have been looking and thought it might just be me.
Bourdieu says that sociology is a kind of martial art – that is, you should use it for self-defence. And self-defence in the special sense of learning how to use the strength of your opponents against them. This I think is the main point about learning how advertising is being used against us – in that it gives us weapons with which to be able to resist attacks. Except, part of the problem with advertising is that it hardly gives you room to breath, it doesn't attack, as such, but rather creates a world you cannot escape. We learn how to operate within environments – which is part of the problem with theories like ‘evolutionary psychology’ for me. The environments such theories are trying to use to explain our current behaviours are mostly dead and gone. A lot of our current environment is not all that ‘real’. It is sort of ‘hyper-real’. For most of human history we learnt how to live by observing how the people around us live. Today we see much less of real people and much more of people living in worlds that are essentially fantasy worlds. This couldn’t be more true of the people who inhabit the worlds of advertising. The point of advertising is to provide us with desires that can never be fully met. They do this by showing us worlds that have never existed, idealised worlds created to appeal to our deepest desires, and then places these worlds forever just out of reach. Literally tantalizing – and like Tantalus our hunger and our thirst always appear to be just about to be sated, with the food and drink always so near, but yet also just out of reach.
Now, the bits of this that I found most interesting where the bits about how you can be more convinced of something when you are being distracted. There is an experiment that is discussed here where they asked people to buy something like chocolate. Let’s say the ‘special offer’ was a bar of chocolate for three dollars. So, in one case they said to people, ‘how would you like to buy this chocolate, it only costs three dollars’. And say (I’m not going to look up the details, sorry) that meant that 30% of people actually bought the chocolate. Well, if the person selling the chocolate said instead, ‘how would you like to buy this chocolate, it only costs 300 cents – that is, three dollars’ – people were much more likely to buy the chocolate.
Similarly, if you wanted to get people to vote for someone that they previously didn’t like, one of the best ways was to ask them to give you their ten best reasons for not voting for that person. The point being that it is actually quite hard to come up with ten reasons – and so, if people try this and can’t come up with ten reasons, they tend to think the candidate can’t really be as bad as they initially thought.
This is quite a nice little book and very useful. Basically, it is a text book – but there is nothing wrong with that, it is an enjoyable read all the same.
This is, of course, utter nonsense. There is just about no chance that international corporations would waste billions of dollars on something unless they absolutely had to and it worked a treat.
Part of the reason for this mismatch of theory and practice is that there is a very strong positivist / economics leaning to some of the stuff I’ve been reading about advertising – and these ideas are more or less premised on the belief in the economically rational individual who seeks to do what they can to maximise their advantage and the utility of their resources. Over the last few years I’ve done quite a bit of reading around behavioural economics – for want of a better term – which has discussed some of the problems associated with the purely rational individual, 'homo-economicus' as some people refer to them – and how we are systematically likely to behave in ways that are clearly opposed to our own best interests. That is pretty much what I was after – a book that would bring together the work that has been done on these kinds of studies and how that work has been used by the advertising industry.
There has never really been all that much doubt in my mind that the advertising industry wouldn’t be using the flaws in our decision-making systems against us – so I was surprised that so many of the books I’ve been reading have sounded like the kinds of psychology you might read in the 1950s, essentially, behaviourist very much in the old sense. I've also been a bit surprised at how few of the examples in behavioural economics texts have spoken about advertising.
So this book came as a welcome relief. They even say at the start that the reason why they put this book together was that there simply weren’t any books on this stuff available – which is a good thing, as I have been looking and thought it might just be me.
Bourdieu says that sociology is a kind of martial art – that is, you should use it for self-defence. And self-defence in the special sense of learning how to use the strength of your opponents against them. This I think is the main point about learning how advertising is being used against us – in that it gives us weapons with which to be able to resist attacks. Except, part of the problem with advertising is that it hardly gives you room to breath, it doesn't attack, as such, but rather creates a world you cannot escape. We learn how to operate within environments – which is part of the problem with theories like ‘evolutionary psychology’ for me. The environments such theories are trying to use to explain our current behaviours are mostly dead and gone. A lot of our current environment is not all that ‘real’. It is sort of ‘hyper-real’. For most of human history we learnt how to live by observing how the people around us live. Today we see much less of real people and much more of people living in worlds that are essentially fantasy worlds. This couldn’t be more true of the people who inhabit the worlds of advertising. The point of advertising is to provide us with desires that can never be fully met. They do this by showing us worlds that have never existed, idealised worlds created to appeal to our deepest desires, and then places these worlds forever just out of reach. Literally tantalizing – and like Tantalus our hunger and our thirst always appear to be just about to be sated, with the food and drink always so near, but yet also just out of reach.
Now, the bits of this that I found most interesting where the bits about how you can be more convinced of something when you are being distracted. There is an experiment that is discussed here where they asked people to buy something like chocolate. Let’s say the ‘special offer’ was a bar of chocolate for three dollars. So, in one case they said to people, ‘how would you like to buy this chocolate, it only costs three dollars’. And say (I’m not going to look up the details, sorry) that meant that 30% of people actually bought the chocolate. Well, if the person selling the chocolate said instead, ‘how would you like to buy this chocolate, it only costs 300 cents – that is, three dollars’ – people were much more likely to buy the chocolate.
Similarly, if you wanted to get people to vote for someone that they previously didn’t like, one of the best ways was to ask them to give you their ten best reasons for not voting for that person. The point being that it is actually quite hard to come up with ten reasons – and so, if people try this and can’t come up with ten reasons, they tend to think the candidate can’t really be as bad as they initially thought.
This is quite a nice little book and very useful. Basically, it is a text book – but there is nothing wrong with that, it is an enjoyable read all the same.
March 30, 2015
A nice, comprehensive and useful review on implicit attitudes and their measurement (Chapter 4), models of persuasive communications (Chapter 5) and techniques to convince customers accept the offer without changing their attitudes (chapter 7).
The book is not very well-structured and a bit chaotic which makes it a horrible study book, but it reviews and combines important research studies from the fields of Marketing Communications, Social Psychology and Advertising.
The book is not very well-structured and a bit chaotic which makes it a horrible study book, but it reviews and combines important research studies from the fields of Marketing Communications, Social Psychology and Advertising.
December 6, 2018
I don't tend to save the books that I have to read for class on Goodreads, except when I actually liked them and I'd like to remember them (cause I'm definitely selling them anyway, cause money).
July 7, 2018
"This will be discussed in chapter 5"
August 12, 2019
This book offers an excellent introduction to the psychology of advertising and really dives into the cognitive mechanisms that attract attention and influence consumer behavior. Specific examples of different types of advertising are plentiful, but sometimes the explanations can be a bit dense.
November 25, 2017
Great books with good into into consumer behavior and attitudes including tactics used to influence them. specially recommended for psychology students looking for a career in industrial psychology.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews