Download Advertising and Society

Current Issues In Advertising
Central issues of advertising are divided into 3
categories:
 1st category represents Nature & Content of
Advertising.
 Remaining 2 categories represents aggregate
effects of advertising on society as a whole i.e.
Secondary Effects, those are:
1) Effects on Society’s Values and Lifestyle
2) Effect of advertisement on Society’s Wellbeing
Nature & Content of Advertising
Ethics
 Ethics in advertising means a set of well
defined principles which govern the ways
of communication taking place between
the seller and the buyer.
 An ethical ad is the one which doesn’t lie,
doesn’t make fake or false claims and is in
the limit of decency.
 Nowadays, ads are more exaggerated and
a lot of puffing is used which is not ethical.
1)
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Ethics in Advertising is directly related to the
purpose of advertising and the nature of
advertising.
Sometimes exaggerating the ad becomes
necessary to prove the benefit of the product. For
e.g. a sanitary napkin ad which shows that when
the napkin was dropped in a river by some girls, the
napkin soaked whole water of the river. Thus, the
purpose of advertising was only to inform women
about the product quality. Obviously, every woman
knows that this cannot practically happen but the ad
was accepted. This doesn’t show that the ad was
unethical.
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Ethics also depends on what we believe.
If the advertisers make the ads on the belief that the
customers will understand, persuade them to think,
and then act on their ads, then this will lead to
positive results and the ad may not be called
unethical. But at the same time, if advertisers
believe that they can fool their customers by
showing any impractical things like just clicking
fingers will make your home or office fully furnished
or just buying a lottery ticket will make you a
millionaire, then this is not going to work out for
them and will be called as unethical.
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Recently, the Vatican issued an article which says ads
should follow three moral principles – Truthfulness, Social
Responsibility and Upholding Human Dignity.
Pharmaceutical Advertising - they help creating
awareness, but one catchy point here is that the
advertisers show what the medicine can cure but never
talk about the side effects of that same thing or the risks
involved in intake of it.
Alcohol - till today, there hasn’t come any liquor ad which
shows anyone drinking the original liquor. They use
mineral water and sodas in their advertisements with their
brand name. These types of ads are called surrogate ads.
These type of ads are totally unethical when liquor ads are
totally banned. Even if there are no advertisements for
alcohol, people will continue drinking.
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Cigarettes and Tobacco - these products should be
never advertised as consumption of these things is
directly and badly responsible for cancer and other
severe health issues. These as are already banned
in countries like India, Norway, Thailand, Finland
and Singapore.
Ads for social causes - these types of ads are
ethical and are accepted by the people. But ads like
condoms and contraceptive pills should be limited,
as these are sometimes unethical, and are more
likely to loose morality and decency at places where
there is no educational knowledge about all these
products.
2) Manipulation
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An advertising can manipulate the buyer into
making a decision against his or her will or at least
against his or her best interests in allocating his
financial resources.
A marketer can manipulate the buyer in several
forms:
A Motivational Appeal, the appeal to motives at the
subconscious level.
Use of Indirect Emotional Appeals
Rational/Scientific Appeals
I.
Motivation Research
Freudian Psychoanalytic Model:
 It assumes that important buying motives are subconscious
 For example, A consumer may actually prefer a cake mix that
requires the addition of an egg because it subconsciously
satisfies the need to contribute to the baking process.
 Use of subliminal advertising:
 In 1956 Advertising experiment done by James Vicary, in a
movie theatre, he flashed the phrases, “Drink coke” and
“Hungry, Eat popcorn” on the screen every five seconds.
 This tests, which covered a six-week period , were reported
to have increased cola sales by 57 percent and popcorn
sales by 18 percent.
II.
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Emotional Appeals
An emotional appeal is related to an individual’s
psychological and social needs for purchasing certain
products and services. Many consumers are emotionally
motivated or driven to make certain purchases.
For example, Dishwashing liquids are advertised as
sweeping away the dullness of life. They are
housewife’s path road to beauty and romantic
excitement.
Surf Excel “Daag Achhe Hai”, Cadbury Dairy Milk
Shubhaarambh Ad, HDFC Life Insurance, Voltas A.C.
III. Rational/Scientific Appeals
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Company can use highly sophisticated, scientific
techniques to make such advertising effective.
For example, Colgate Sensodyne, Sunsilk Care Expert
3) Taste
 Taste is an individual's personal and cultural
patterns of choice and preference.
 So as per people’s tastes, some of them
found advertisements annoying, enjoyable,
informative or offensive.
 Advertising may not be omnipotent, but may
contend that it is too omnipresent or
intrusive.
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The purposes of advertising are to inform, remind,
convince and persuade consumers about the value
and merits of specific brands. Advertisers use a
number of specific appeals to tap into target
consumers' psychological, emotional and social
biases, solidifying brand images and creating loyal
customer bases. Different consumers respond
differently to different advertising appeals.
The marketer use different appeals like rational
appeal (for e.g. Sunsilk), emotional appeal (for e.g.
Cadbury Dairy Milk), fear appeal ( for e.g. stop
smoking), humor appeal ( for e.g. flipkart), romance
appeal, music appeal and so on.
Intrusiveness:
Intrusion represents over repetition.
Greyser postulates a lifecycle wherein an advertising campaign
moves with repetition from period of effectiveness
,acceptance and to a period of irritation.
The cycle contains following stages:
1) Exposure to the message on several occasions prior to
serious attention ( Basic interest)
2) Interest in the advertisement on either
substantive(informative) or stimulus ( enjoyment) grounds.
3) Continued but declining attention to the advertisement on
such grounds
4) Mental tune-out of the advertisement on grounds of
familiarity.
5) Increasing awareness of the advertisement, now as a
negative stimulus(irritation)
6) Growing irritation
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Factors affecting Intrusiveness:
Intensity of the campaign: Many
exposures over a short time period run a
high risk of irritation.
Other advertising to which audience is
involved
Product Usage
Brand Preferences
Entertainment Value of Advertising
For e.g. Kitkat Squirrel, Surf Excel “Daag
Achhe Hain”, Airtel
Advertising to Children
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Advertising to children has been a major focus
of public policy and concern for many years.
Groups such as ACT ( Action for Children’s
Television) And CARU (Children’s Advertising
Review Unit) have been particularly active.
CARU was established in 1974 for the
purpose of:
Monitoring children’s advertising for truth and
accuracy
Evaluating proposed children’s advertising
Promoting research into children’s advertising
Disseminating information to the public.
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Deborah Roedder identified three types of child
information processing:
Strategic – for ages ten to eleven years old and
older
Cued – Six to ten years old
Limited – Under six years old
Strategic processors can evaluate a product’s
appeal with greater sophistication because they
can store information about the selling intent,
other products, and past experiences.
Prompts can be used to encourage use of storage
and retrieval strategies by cued processors but
would not benefit limited processors very much.
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The Children’s TV Act of 1990 requires
broadcasters to provide programming
that serves the educational and
informational needs of children and must
limit the amount of advertising for any
programming aimed at children.
For e.g. McDonald’s banned Ad, Flipkart
Effects on Values and Lifestyle
Advertising by its very nature receives wide exposure.
Furthermore, it presumably has an effect on what people buy
and thus on their activities. Because of this exposure and
because of its role as a persuasive vehicle, it is argued that it
has an impact on the values and lifestyles of society and that
this impact has its negative as well as positive side.
 Three issues that have attracted particular attention are:
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The relationship of advertising to materialism,
The role that advertising has played in creating harmful
stereotypes of women and ethnic minorities, and
 The possible contribution of advertising in promoting
harmful products.
1.
Materialism:
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Materialism is defined as the tendency to give
undue importance to material interests.
Presumably, there is a corresponding lessening of
importance to non material interests such as love,
freedom and intellectual pursuits.
But although people do spend their resources on
material things, they do so in the pursuit of non
material goals.
The distinctive aspect of our society is not the
possession of material goods, but the extent to
which material goods are used to attain non
material goals.
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2. Promoting Stereotypes:
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The advertising has contributed to the role of
stereotyping of women and ethnic minorities.
In 729 advertisements appearing in 1970,
none showed women in a professional
capacity. The authors concluded that the
advertisements reflected the stereotype that
women do not do important things.
Thus advertising showing women in traditional
roles is less effective with an audience of
professional women and vice versa.
3. Promoting Harmful Products:
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The basic argument is that alcohol, cigarettes,
tobacco, these are harmful products and they
are indirectly responsible for death resulting
from drunk drivers and other adverse effects.
A ban of advertising would prohibit product
innovation that may be helpful. For e.g. wine
coolers, low alcohol beers.
The real goal is to return to alcohol prohibition,
which did not work-it only created the revenue
source for the gangsters.
Economic Effects on Advertising
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Advertising is basically an economic institution. It
performs an economic function for an advertiser,
affects economic decisions of the audience, and is
an integral part of the whole economic system.
Economic benefits of Advertising:
Advertising provides informational utility
Maintains or enhances brand equity
Supports the media
Provides employment
Reduces distribution costs
Provides product utility
Stimulates introduction of new products
Advertising and Competition
There is a vigorous competition in the
market. Competitive forces lead to real
product innovation, the efficient
distribution of goods, and the absence of
inflated prices.
 George Milne has developed a
marketing approach to the measurement
of industry concentration.
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A Causal Model
Empirical Studies
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Advertising and Prices
Advertising and Profitability
Advertising and Brand Stability
Remedies