The Effectiveness of Advertising: a Literature Review

In his 1982 article, “Advertising’s Fifteen Basic Appeals,” Jib Fowles informs readers of various psychological human needs, defined as appeals. These appeals are used in advertising, to persuade consumers to purchase a product. Due to the prevalence of advertisements in today’s society, consumers have learned to block out advertisements. By using any of the fifteen appeals such as the need for sex, or the need for affiliation, companies can get into consumers’ minds, with hopes of selling their products. In other words, by appealing to consumers desires, the chance of marketing success

Semiotics is a critical approach that studies the symbols as elements of communicative behaviour (Dictionary.com). One would analyze the image influence, language influence, and the intention of the advertisement. Image influence includes colours, pictures, and the action (if necessary). Language influence contains the text size, type of font, and phrases. The intention of the ad includes the purpose and the intended audience (age, gender, culture (etc.)). I will be focusing on the utilization of semiotics through a “Herbal Essences” advertisement. The ad motivates its customers by its image, language, and purpose.

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

The aim of advertising commercials is to win the interest of different groups in the society. Art Markman who has a PhD and is a professor of Psychology and Marketing at the University of Texas writes in his publication “What Does Advertising Do” that the most powerful effect of advertising is to create a good feeling about a product by surrounding it with other things that consumers like (1). The commercial tries to convince the people that its consumption has been embraced

For my semiotic analysis essay i have chosen to evaluate the Oxfam’s ‘Lose yourself - Vintage’ campaign. This will be used to show how advertising uses codes to develop an image in order to attract customers. “Advertising is the official art of the advanced industrial nations of the west”, the industry uses a wide variety of techniques to get attract the audience. The placement of particular text, imagery, colours and other signs is an imperative aspect to what makes an advert successful.

To conclude, after watching ads for over two hours I have learned that advertising is an effective method of persuasion. I noticed that several ads applied multiple appeals to persuade viewers to buy their products. I also noticed that several techniques were applied to make the viewer more interested in products. Before this exercise, I did not realize that I subconsciously paid attention to advertising on television. In the future, I will try to be more conscious of my buying

The article highlights commercials since they contain a highly compressed image that points for maximum efficiency in relocating its message. For Barthes, advertisements are a very suitable vehicle in which to discover the way ideologies are reproduced in graphic images. Advertisements have to use conventional terminology and convey its message very fast, and be able to speak

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;

Visual representation of reality, as seen through mass media, is acknowledged by sociologists to be influential in shaping people's views of the world. Our everyday realities are articulated mostly by what we see in the media. The role of advertising in this interpretation of reality is crucial. The target audience's self-identification with the images being a basic prerequisite for an advertisement's effectiveness, makes advertising one of the most important factors in the building of behavior models and values systems. The way a certain notion is managed at a visual level determines how people will perceive this notion and whether they will identify with it or not. Meaning is encoded in the

Everywhere a person looks, they will see some type of advertisement. Fliers, posters, billboards, commercials, and magazines, humans are constantly bombarded with ads of all types each and every day. Every advertisement aims to inform the consumers about the existence of a specific product or service. Advertisers use two ways to inform consumers of their products or services, and they are a cognitive approach or an emotional approach. What approach they take is completely up to the company, but what all advertisements seek to do is carry out and communicate a certain message to society. This message is associated with the marketing objective of the sponsor, and most of the time that objective is to affect the consumers purchasing decision.

Consumer insight: The underlying consumer motivation is temporarily escaping from stress and communication overload. The ad is appealing and effective to the target.

The theory of semiotics, as proposed by Roland Barthes, has been used to analyze advertisements and the effectiveness of advertisements on viewers. In the articles that I researched that used semiotics to analyze particular advertisements, I found four common and related themes. First, the articles mentioned that the viewer determines the meaning of the advertisement or the viewer interprets the advertisement. Second, this meaning that the viewer assigns to the advertisement is largely determined by context, both social and cultural. Third, advertisers use culture and predominant cultural beliefs in their advertisements in efforts to reach their audience more effectively. Finally, these advertisements actually end up supporting the

The main objective of the advertisement is to create a favorable climate for maintaining of improving sales. Customers are to be reminded about the product and the brand. It may induce new customers to buy the product by informing them its qualities since it is possible that some of the customers may change their brands.

Advertising which uses various media as a tool is a persuasive and powerful force that is shaping behaviour and attitude in society. It is one of the cost effective strategy which disseminates messages to educate people and plays a very significant role in everyday life, as indicators of social and economic progress.

Advertising is a persuasive communication attempt to change or reinforce one’s prior attitude that is predictable of future behavior. We are not born with the attitudes for which we hold toward various things in our environment. Instead, we learn our feelings of favorability or unfavorability through information about the object through advertising or direct experience with the object, or some combination of the two. Furthermore, the main aim of advertising is to ‘persuade’ to consumer in order to generate new markets for production.