Is the Purpose of Advertising to Create Cognitive Dissonance?

The main purpose of commercials and advertisements is to persuade the viewer to purchase the product that is advertised, but not all commercials are successful in this endeavor. Companies, such as Budweiser and Kleenex, appeal to the viewers’ ethos, logos, and pathos in order to influence them to buy the advertised product(s). In order to appeal to each of the categories, companies use different tactics to catch viewers’ attention. The use of ethos, logos, and pathos can make or break an advertisement based on how it is being used.

Advertisements come in various shapes, sizes, and mediums, and as humans, we are constantly surrounded by them. Whether they are on TV, radio, or in a magazine, there is no way that we can escape them. They all have their target audience for whom the advertisers have specifically designed the ad. When a company produces a commercial, their main objective is to get their product to sell. This is a multibillion-dollar industry and the advertisers study all the ways that they can attract their audience’s attention. The producers of advertisements have many tactics and strategies they use when producing an ad to get consumers to buy their product. These include things such as rhetorical

When followed by recommendations, threats define the typical format of a fear appeal. Threats in its entirety refers to undesirable events, whereas recommendations refer to strategies for dealing with these undesirable events (Boyd, 1995). This study focusses in on a curvilinear hypothesis, where the amount of fear generated by a fear appeal mediates message compliance. “The subjects were informed that the purpose of the study was to obtain their reactions toward ads being considered for inclusion in a college-oriented magazine publication, entitled NOT (Boyd, 1995). The relationship between the generated fear and message compliance in turn forms an inverted U. At low levels of fear, users are uninterested to process the fear appeal because they consider the information as insignificant. At high levels, however, consumers tend to engage in defense mechanisms such as denial, prevention, and anger (Boyd, 1995). Two aspects of a threatening message operate in a multiplicative fashion to engender fear as well. These two aspects consist of severity and vulnerability. Severity refers to the noxiousness of a threat, whereas vulnerability refers to the probability of threat occurrence if no action is taken. A balanced fear appeal bears

Throughout the last decades there has been vast improvements in advertising and its persuasive effects to our psychology. Not only has it become part of our global culture, it is so deeply ingrained in our society that we sometimes don't even notice if someone trying persuade us by their use of simplistic persuasive techniques. It is only when we reflect on the speech, video, or advertisement that we can pinpoint their propaganda objectives.

Cognitive Dissonance strategy is use to enforce our feelings about a situation. In the Montana campaign against meth they use this strategy by the Fear and Drive reduction and shock tactics getting people to feel uncomfortable with the shocking graphics and fear. Repeated exposure of these and according to mere exposure the more we are expose to this ad we favor not to try meth at all. You become scared straight to never try meth not even once.

Attitudes are evaluations of people, objects, and ideas. (Akert, 2013) Cognitively based attitudes are based on thoughts and beliefs one has about an object, and this attitude provides pros and cons of an object, so we can decide if we want to be associated with it or not. Affectively based attitudes are based more on people’s feelings and values than on their beliefs about the nature of an attitude object. (Akert, 2013) The elaboration likelihood model is the umbrella for this topic, because it explains the two ways in which persuasion can change someone attitude. The two ways are persuasion through the central route and the persuasion through the peripheral route. The elaboration likelihood model refers to processing the message which is related to the cognitively based attitudes. Persuasive communication is most successful in changing attitudes when going through the central route because the audience is motivated, whereas with the peripheral route the audience is not motivated. Now I am going to discuss the routes of persuasion through advertisements in detail.

Both of these authors would seem to agree in the sense that the underlying messages and emotional and rational appeals present in commercial advertisements are the key to what make them memorable to the viewers. Although both authors focus on different aspects of the psychological perspective they both make it clear that there are various factors to take into consideration when analyzing the influence that advertisements can have on consumers. In order to influence the public the way that they do, advertisements use emotional appeals along with various arousal tactics in order to make the commercial as persuasive as possible. They attempt to stimulate not only our 5 main senses but they also appeal to our minds, moods, and feelings by making their situations either hilarious, sad, or informative in some way so that we, as the viewers, can relate on a deeper

Advertising is a form of communication used to encourage or persuade an audience to continue or take some new action. But when advertisers produce an ad, they have many different variables that come into play if they want to successfully persuade consumers. The first most important step they have to figure out is, what type of audience they are trying to target. They then create images and intend to appeal specifically to the values, hopes, and desires of that particular audience. This is why someone would rather pick the well-known Malboro cowboy ads over the new female cigarettes of Virginia Slims. Each of these ads targets a specific audience;

Cognitive dissonance is the concept of two opposed ideas that cause either a change in one's life beliefs or morals. This refers to a situation involving conflicting attitudes, beliefs or behaviors. This produces a feeling of discomfort leading to a change in one of the attitudes beliefs or actions to reduce the discomfort and restore balance. For example, when people smoke (behavior) and they know that smoking causes cancer (cognition), they are in a state of cognitive dissonance. This concept of cognitive dissonance can expand to a much deeper sense. From people's everyday habits and changes

The message conveyed through the advertising appeals influences the purchasing decisions of consumers. In this case, the advertisement was aired by Carl’s Jr fast food restaurant to advertise their new “all natural burger”. It was aired during the Super bowl because majority of the audience, men and woman, are watching the game. And it makes it easy for them to put their product out because most people that watch the Super bowl just watch the commercials.

The purpose of this study is to provide theoretical and practical guidance for fear appeal advertising. This research will do so by using the predictions of the Ordered Protection Motivation model to improve the effectiveness of threat appeals and studying it in an anti-smoking communications. Previous research into this area has been flawed by a number of improper assumptions therefore leaving a weak theoretical base and a need for more practical guidance. For this research, the level of threat used in the communication in addition to the type of threat used will be examined in terms of their effect on the coping response chosen by an adolescent individual. From here, the coping response will be tested in terms of its effect on attitude towards the advertisement and towards smoking. Adolescent smoking behaviour has become of increasing concern because of the number of adolescent individuals taking up this unhealthy habit. As a result of this, in addition to the fact that different types of threats have varying importance to adolescents, they have been deemed as relevant population for study. Advertisements used in the study are being created by two graphic designers. Data will be collected from approximately 300 adolescent respondents. These respondents will be taken from public and private schools in the metropolitan area of New York and will be narrowed to grades 11 and 12. This research has significance for theory as it tests the main concepts brought up in

The role of advertisements are simply created to conform the assumptions about the people who are either viewing or going to purchase the product which is seen in the ad. Advertisers know that specific ads are more or less appealing to a certain social class, hoping that their product will successfully land in front of the eyes of their ideal consumer, who will then be motivated to purchase what is seen in the ad.

The Purpose of Advertising The purpose of advertising is to familiarise the public with a certain brand or product. Companies spend millions of pounds a year on advertising so that when the public are searching for a product or service a certain brand is recognised and, as a result, their product or service is chosen. Companies need to ensure that their money is spent wisely. They do this by completing extensive market and physcological research.

     However, with every positive side comes a negative, and advertising is no different. Advertising has been blamed for a great variety of negative social impacts. One of the major criticisms received by advertising is that it forces people to buy things they don’t really need, often projecting negative emotions such as fear, anxiety of guilt upon the consumer (Engel). It is claimed that advertising plays with our basic human emotions and takes advantage of them, using them as merely another technique to sell goods or services.

Advertising provides abundant product information for the public, it promotes a product, service or ideas, they attract people’s aspirations, fantasies and lifestyle. They produce both connotation and denotation structures that sell the products to the public. The publics opinion on products are sculpted through the influences of advertisement, for example a man may buy a certain aftershave because the advertisements have a woman that is throwing herself in a sexual manner at the model wearing the product so the consumer will be more reluctant to purchase this