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Belch: Advertising and
Promotion, Sixth Edition
III. Analyzing the
Communication Process
5. The Communication
Process
and use repetitive advertising to create and maintain favorable attitudes toward their
brand.
© The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2003
As you have seen from our analysis of
the receiver, the process consumers go
through in responding to marketing
communications can be viewed from a
number of perspectives. Vakratsas and
Ambler recently reviewed more than 250 journal articles and books in an effort to better
understand how advertising works and affects the consumer. 35 On the basis of their
review of these studies, they concluded that although effects hierarchies have been
actively employed for nearly 100 years, there is little support for the concept of a hierarchy
of effects in the sense of temporal sequence. They note that in trying to understand
the response process and the manner in which advertising works, there are three
critical intermediate effects between advertising and purchase (Figure 5-10). These
include cognition, the “thinking” dimension of a person’s response; affect, the “feeling”
dimension; and experience, which is a feedback dimension based on the outcomes of
product purchasing and usage. They conclude that individual responses to advertising
are mediated or filtered by factors such as motivation and ability to process information,
which can radically alter or change the individual’s response to advertising. They
suggest that the effects of advertising should be evaluated using these three dimensions,
with some intermediate variables being more important than others, depending on factors
such as the product category, stage of the product life cycle, target audience, competition,
and impact of other marketing-mix components.
Other researchers have been critical of the hierarchy models as well. For example,
Hall argues that advertisers need to move away from explicit and implicit reliance on
hierarchical models of advertising effects and develop models that place affect and
experience at the center of the advertising process. 36 Summarizing the Response Process
and the Effects of Advertising
The implication of these criticisms
is that marketers should focus on cognition, affect, and experience as critical
variables that advertising may affect. However, they should not assume a particular
sequence of responses but, rather, engage in research and analysis to better understand
how advertising and other forms of promotion may affect these intermediate variables
in various product/market situations.
Those responsible for planning the IMC program need to learn as much as possible
about their target audience and how it may respond to advertising, along with other
forms of marketing communication. For example, William Weilbacher has noted that
Advertising input
Message content, media scheduling,
repetition
Filters
Motivation, ability (involvement)
Consumer
Cognition Affect Experience
Consumer behavior
Choice, consumption,
loyalty, habit, etc.
Figure 5-10 A framework
for studying how
advertising works
161
Chapter Five The Communication Process