Advertising

Cognitive and Affective Advertising That Stands Out

Photo courtesy of Harvard Business ReviewOpens in new window Advertising is used as a prime method for generating new customers in B2C (business-to-customers) environments. Advertising can be defined as follows:

Advertising can be successful at achieving two different classes of communication objective:

1. cognitive and
2. affective.

Advertising alone is often insufficient to generate behavioral outcomes such as trial purchasing. It can, however, predispose audiences to make an intention-to-buy based on what they learned about and felt towards the advertised product.

New customers generally need to be made aware of the product and to understand what benefits it can deliver prior to purchase.

In high involvement purchasing contexts, where products or their usage context are personally significant and relevant to the consumer, prospects will normally progress through a learn-feel-do process when making their first purchase.

In other words, before they buy, they acquire information that helps them learn about and compare alternatives, thus reducing perceived risk. They then develop a preference for, and intention-to-buy, a particular offer.

Customers are essentially conducting a complex problem-solving process. Advertising is one of the sources they can use in the learn-feel part of that process. It is, however, not the only source of information, nor is it necessarily the most powerful.

High involvement advertising can employ long copy because prospects use advertising to learn about alternatives. Comparison advertising and copy featuring endorsements by opinion formers may be influential. Media that help prospects to acquire and process information are those that have a long dwell-time such as magazines and newspapers.

Advertising can also evoke powerful emotional responses in audiences. The type of response that advertisers seek in prospects is ‘I like the look of that. I really must try it.’ This is an affective response linked to a buying intention.

• Ads for fashion items, jewellery and vacation destinations often aim for an emotional response.
• TV ads evoke emotions by their clever mix of voice, music, images and sound effects.

Advertisers can pre-test different executions to ensure that the right sort of emotional response is evoked.

In low involvement contexts, where the product category or its usage context is relatively unimportant, prospects are very unlikely to go through a complex and demanding learn-feel-do process. Rather, there will be little or no pre-purchase comparison of alternatives.

The prospect is much more likely to simply become aware of the product and buy it. There may not even be post-purchase evaluation of the experience except in the most elementary of forms. Evaluation may only take place if the product fails to deliver the benefits expected. The purchase model is therefore learn-do.

The role of advertising for low involvement products is to build and maintain brand awareness and recognition.

Advertisers are concerned with two major issues as they attempt to generate new customers:

1. message and,
2. media issues.

1.    Message

Although precise measurement has not been conducted, it has been suggested that heavy media users are exposed to cover one thousand ads per week. Yet, how many can the person recall?

What stands out? Here are some examples:

Message execution is an important issue in gaining an audience’s attention. Messages can be executed in many different ways.

Execution styles can be classified in a number of ways:

1. rational or emotional,
2. factual or fanciful,
3. funny or serious.

Individual forms of execution include:

Advertisements often close with a call to action, such as a suggestion that the audience clip a coupon, call a number or register online. These actions generate useful sources of prospects that can then be followed up.

Pre-testing messages on a sample of potential new customers is a way to improve the chances of an ad achieving its objectives. Among the criteria you can assess are the following:

• Recall. How much of the ad can the sample recall?
• Comprehension. Does the sample understand the ad?
• Credibility. Is the message believable?
• Feelings evoked. How does the sample feel about the ad?
• Intention-to-buy. How likely is it that the sample will buy?

If you buy space or time in media that have local or regional editions, you can conduct post-tests to assess the effectiveness of different executions in achieving the desired outcomes.

2.    Media

Media selection for new customer acquisitionOpens in new window is sometimes quite straightforward. For example, there are print media such as What Digital CameraOpens in new window that are targeted specifically at new-to-category prospects for high involvement products.

An uninvolved prospect will only learn passively about your product because there is no active search for and processing of information. Consequently, for low involvement prospects, frequency is a more important media consideration than reach. These are defined as follows:

The total number of exposures is therefore computed by multiplying reach by frequency. If your ad reaches two million people an average of four times, the total number of impressions or exposures is eight million.

For high involvement products lower levels of frequency are generally sufficient. Advertising agencies should be able to offer advice on how many exposures (frequency) it takes to evoke a particular response in an audience member, and what media are most appropriate.

You can compute various media efficiency statistics to help you get better value for money from your customer acquisition budget. These include response rates and conversion rates.

Critics of the use of advertising for customer acquisition claim that ads are ineffective at customer acquisitionOpens in new window. They argue that ads work on current and past customers and therefore impact more on retentionOpens in new window. Others point to the ineffectiveness of advertising at influencing sales at all.

Len LodishOpens in new window, for example, concluded that “there is no simple correspondence between increased TV advertising weight and increased sales”. In one study he found that the sales of only 49 percent of advertised products responded positively to increases in advertising weight.

Another media consideration is the timing of the ad exposure. Some electronic media allow messaging to be delivered at the time the customer is searching for a supplier or product.

Relevant Google ads appear to the right of the screen when a user has entered a search term. Ads can be delivered to mobile phones based on the phone’s location, as identified by the phone’s global positioning system (GPS) data.