Knowledge

The customer begins to gain knowledge about the product for example through the internet, retail advisors and product packaging. In today's digital world this step has become more important as consumers expect to gather product knowledge at the click of a button. Consumers will quickly move to competitor brands if they do not get the information they want. The advertiser's job is to ensure product information is easily available. This is a step past awareness when consumers have a working understanding of what your product offers. Aflac targeted this stage when it moved its famous "Duck" character to the background of its commercials to promote insurance product benefits to information consumers.

Liking

As the title states, this step is about ensuring that the customer likes your product. As an advertiser what features can you promote to encourage the customer to like your product?

Preference

Consumers may like more than one product brand and could end up buying any one of them. At this stage advertisers will want the consumer to disconnect from rival products and focus on their particular product. Advertisers will want to highlight their brand's benefits and unique selling points so that the consumer can differentiate it from competitor brands.

Conviction

This stage is about creating the customer's desire to purchase the product. Advertisers may encourage conviction by allowing consumers to test or sample the product. Examples of this are inviting consumers to take a car for a test drive or offering consumers a free sample of a food product. This reassures consumers that the purchase will be a safe one.

Purchase

Having proceeded through the above stages, the advertiser wants the customer to purchase their product. This stage needs to be simple and easy, otherwise the customer will get fed up and walk away without a purchase. For example a variety of payment options encourages purchase whilst a complicated and slow website discourages purchases.

Six Steps and Behaviour

Lavidge and Steiner suggested that the six steps can be split into three stages of consumer behaviour: cognitive, affective and conative. The job of the advertiser is to promote the three behaviours.

• Cognitive (thinking) so that the consumer becomes product aware and gathers product knowledge

• Affective (feeling) so that the consumer likes the product brand and has conviction in it

• Conative (behaviour) so that the consumer buys the product brand

This model is known as a "hierarchy" because the number of consumers moving from one stage to the next reduces, as you move through the model. There may be a lot of consumers that see the product advert but not everyone will make a purchase. It takes a lot of work to take a consumer from awareness to the final stage of purchase, so businesses need to ensure that they try their utmost to get customers from conviction to complete the final stage of purchase.

Should this hierarchy of effects model follow the cognitive → affective → conative sequence?

The most often cited hierarchy model was posited by Lavidge and Steiner (1961) and is presented in Table 1. These writers believed that advertising was an investment in a long-term process that moved consumers over time through a variety of stair-step stages, beginning with product 'unawareness' and moving ultimately to actual purchase. Their view of the stages of the advertising hierarchy is implicitly a causal one. However, by recognizing that advertising is essentially a 'long-term' process, it suggests that a causal influence between stages must occur only in the long-run, although it may not be found in the short-run. The argument that a favourable response at one step is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for a favourable response at the next step is central to the idea of advertising hierarchy of response models to this day (Preston and Thorson, 1983). Table 1 The Lavidge-Steiner traditional order hierarchy of effects

Model Stage Model Order

Purchase

Conative

Conviction

(a)Preference

Affective

(a)Liking

(a)Knowledge

Cognition

Awareness (a)Indicates a stage not presented in predecessor models.

The cognitive construct contains declarative and procedural knowledge. The distinction between these is

that the former refers to the way we link concepts together and the latter to our abilities to apply this knowledge.

Conation is divided into two parts: motivation and volition. The motivational factor includes among other things

internal and external goal-orientation, fear of failure, need for achievement, self-esteem, belief in one’s own

abilities and prospects, all of which are at the core of enterprising learning. Volitional structure entails among

others, persistence, the will to learn, endeavour or effort, mindfulness in learning, intrinsic regulation and

evaluation processes as well as different control strategies. (Ruohotie and Koiranen 2000.) Motivation precedes

volitional processes to formulate the goals, but volition guides in setting clear goals as well as in the enactment

and realisation of the decision. Thus both of these factors are essential in entrepreneurial and enterprising

learning. Affection is divided into temperament and emotion. Temperament is more lasting and hardly

dependent on individual situational factors, while an emotion may be strongly linked to a situation. If affection

is embedded in all situations and each individual has his/her own temperament, it is hard to see that we can

isolate these from a learning situation. For example, research in the field of fear of failure is deeply embedded in

the concept of emotion and also temperament. A need for achievement can also be seen from an affective

perspective. At a deeper level the affective construct relates to our values and attitudes. To put this simply,

what we regard as valuable guides our willingness and interest to learn. Thus the affective construct is as

fundamental to our learning as the conative construct.

References

Barry, T., & Howard, D. (1990). A review and critique of the

hierarchy of effects in advertising. International Journal

of Advertising, 9, 121–135.

Hair, J.F., Black, W.C., Babin, B.J., Anderson, R.E., & Tatham,

R.L. (2006). Multivariate Data Analysis (6th ed.). NJ:

Pearson Prentice Hall.

Keller, K.L. (2003). Brand synthesis: The multidimensionality

of brand knowledge. The Journal of Consumer Research,

29(4), 595–600.

Tsiotsou, R., & Lalountas, D. (2005). Applying event

study analysis to assess the impact of marketing

communication strategies: The case of sponsorship.

Applied Financial Economics Letters, 1(4), 259–262.

Veltri, F., Luehmann-Jaynes, H., & Kuzma, J. (2001). Two

methods of sponsor identification: Impact on consumer

attitudes. International Journal of Sport Management,

2, 152–165.

4) On pp. 166 – 167 of the textbook, there is a discussion of the use of various advertising appeals including fear. Analyze and discuss using fear and one other advertising appeal type to design a new advertising campaign to persuade young adults (18 – 25) to quit smoking cigarettes. If you choose rationality as an alternative advertising appeal type, would you expect rationality or a fear appeal advertisement to be more successful in persuading young adults to quit smoking or not to become smokers?

Most smokers take up smoking before the age of 18.

Children whose parents or siblings smoke are around three times more likely to smoke than children living in non-smoking households.

Although around three quarters of teenagers report that they have never smoked, among those who do experiment with smoking many become addicted to nicotine and continue to smoke as adults.

The effectiveness of youth-focused health education is limited and at best appears to delay the age of starting to smoke. It appears that the best way of reducing youth smoking is to have comprehensive tobacco control policies in place that apply to the whole population.

The differences between subjective feelings of those who smoke and those who don’t are shown in behavioral changes that are more apparent in teens than adults. Teens seem to be more abrasive when smoking or they feel like they are older and wiser when they smoke. Why do they smoke when we have seen billions of dollars spent on antismoking campaigns? 

We now see a lot of smokers giving each other rewards in social aspects such as conversations, companionships, and other common social contacts. Research has proven the fact that nicotine has the ability to suppress feelings, suppress appetite for food, is used as stimulation after sex, and is a good way to relax from troubles and feelings of insecurities. People that smoke go to designated areas and congregate around the one that has the light, even when the weather is sub-zero. There they are huddled up against each other in an area, taking in the last drag before the break is over, or they find some kind of shelter to smoke their cigarettes. Smoking is harmful for not just the smoker, but also for those around, who are known as the victims of passive smoking.

Studies show that smokers are more likely to have a heart attack (chances are almost double) than people who have never smoked. Anti-smoking slogans help emphasize the importance of health. Catchy slogans make people aware of the need to quit smoking. Short but meaningful catch-lines make people think about the life-threatening effects of smoking.

From the hazards to health to the effect of smoking on the environment, slogans that convey the message "quit/avoid smoking", take care of every aspect of smoking. Some even target the financial aspect of smoking as cigarettes do not come cheap. For example in countries like Singapore, smoking can make a hole in one's lungs as well as his pocket. In order to drive the message home, some organizations also endorse celebrities who word these slogans. These slogans are often accompanied with images that increase their effectiveness. Some of the interesting anti-smoke slogans are

Catchy Slogans for Anti-Smoking Campaigns

Be smart don't start.

Make your choices, it's your life.

Smoking is like paying someone to kill you. They're rich; you're dead.

Smoking? You must be joking...

Too much smoke will leave you broke.

In consumer advertising, it is widely recognised that messages can be either poorly comprehended or mistakenly comprehended.Despite advertisers' best efforts, consumers frequently misunderstand the specific claims that are made, the general conclusions reached, and/or the sponsors of the advertisements. Hence, it is commonplace for advertisers to test consumers' comprehension of advertisements in rough cut and/or final form, to rectify any problems that might arise.Subtle changes in wording or dramatisation can make a substantial difference in whether a message is generally understood by target audience members.

There are some who believe that people can be subliminally persuaded by advertisements, independent of message awareness or comprehension.However, numerous studies by psychologists and consumer researchers have found no link between subliminal messages and consumer behaviour. It appears that subliminal advertising simply does not have the power attributed to it by its advocates.As one advertising agency executive put it, “We have enough trouble persuading consumers using a series of up front 30 second advertisements—how could we do it in 1/300th of a second?”.The rare instances of documented subliminal advertising effects have been produced in highly contrived and artificial settings that have little relevance to marketers.

Anti-smoking messages can be quite complex—for example, those that argue that tobacco marketers use deception to sell a deadly and addictive product. If youths fail to understand what an advertisement is saying, it is unlikely to have the intended effects. At least one study found that an anti-smoking advertisement that was carefully crafted by adult professionals, but subtle in its approach rather than hard hitting, was poorly understood by the adolescents for whom it was intended.Hence, we predicted that anti-smoking campaigns with a higher proportion of readily comprehended and strong messages would tend to be more cost effective.