Is the Purpose of Advertising to Create Cognitive Dissonance

The background given provides us with an idea of the definition of advertising, its purpose and goals, its different cycles

Advertising is not only used to sell products, it also affects the ideas of who we are. Each and every day we are induced to believe that we must spend money to attain an ideal

Advertisements are structured in a way to appeal to consumers in one of four aspects: biological, emotional, rational, or social. We are going to use a biological appeal, as well as a rational appeal in our advertisements.

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

Advertisements are a part of our everyday lives and we encounter thousands every day on television, in newspapers, on the radio, on the internet. Advertisements use three basic tricks to persuade the people as listed by Aristotle: Ethos, Pathos, and Logos. Ethos is an appeal to ethics, and it is used to convince the viewer of the credibility. Pathos is an appeal to emotion and is used to convince the viewer by creating an emotional response. Logos is an appeal to logic and is used to persuade the viewer by logic. An advertisement may use one, two or a combination of all three. They have the power to persuade us into buying things that we might or might not want. Not every advertisement aims at materialistic things. Some advertisements want to educate us on a persistent issue, some might want to raise awareness and even aid funding, some try to remind us of important events that might be taking place in our county. The advertising agencies try to be as creative as possible in order to grab utmost attention. But sometimes, in doing so, they end up hurting sentiments of a community of people. I will discuss one such advertisement in my journal below.

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.

The message conveyed through advertising influences the purchasing decisions of consumers. That’s why advertiser uses the three appeals as a way of persuading people to buy certain products or to understand the message that they’re trying to convey. For most advertising appeals, they are designed in a way that creates a positive image of the content in the ad. However for this advertisement, that is not the case at all because the attitude and the message of this posters is to make them understand that a change must take place. These ads are using an advertising strategy of appeal to the reader's pathos.

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.

Advertising is the marketing of an idea in ways that encourages and persuades audiences to take some sort of action. In most cases, the action would be to buy a product or service while other are simply to raise awareness. Whatever the case may be, money is poured into advertising every day. Marketing agencies try various ways to convince people to buy their products using different persuasion techniques. After first examining an advertisement, one could analyze how each detail in the ad was specifically designed to affect its audience in a way that convinces them that they need what is being advertised. One would also be able to notice the values and important aspects of a culture through its advertisements. For

Advertisers must be extremely careful when considering the use of emotional appeals in general; however, fear appeals are even more controversial. Negative emotional appeals such as the ones used in the three ad campaigns aim to create a feeling of fear or anxiety about the outcome of not using the product. In this case, fear appeals create these feelings about the outcome of texting and driving, drinking and driving, and smoking tobacco. Fear appeals risk the chance of giving the consumer so much fear that they do not focus on the solution. If an advertisement causes too much fear, “consumers’ perceptual defense [help] them block out and ignore the message (due to its threatening nature)” (Hoyer, MacInnis, and Pieters 145). Additionally, there are moral issues with fear appeals because the product, service, or idea involved must be enough to fully solve the issue presented. The delicate balance of fear appeals is tested in the following three campaigns.

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;

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.

     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 has become so prevalent in our lives today due to mass media. It is every form from print to online through social media and websites, advertising has never had this much importance. From driving in your car to scrolling through your daily feed every person is exposed to advertising in a variety of forms.