Persuasion in advertising

233 Pages·2004·4.22 MB·English

by  John O'Shaughnessy

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3111 Effective advertising is, almost always, persuasive advertising. While not all adver-
4 tising seeks to persuade, in a competitive situation those who best persuade are those
5 most likely to win. This exciting new book seeks to explain the precise ways in which
6 advertising successfully persuades consumers, setting out strategies for advertisers to
7 adopt and illustrating the theories at work.
8 Offering not only a conceptual and theoretical grounding in persuasive techniques,
9 Persuasion in Advertisingalso provides concrete empirical research that is uniquely
20111 incorporated into a marketing textbook format. The authors cover topics including:
1 difficulties of persuasion, rationality and emotion in persuasion, positive reinforcement
2 techniques and cognitive approaches to persuasion.
3 To illuminate these theories, the book includes original case studies on campaigns
4 as diverse as Death Cigarettes, Mecca Cola, the Oxo Family and Renault Clio, as well
5 as recent advertisements from BMW, McDonald’s, Omega and Silk Cut.
6 A genuinely fresh and accessible text on the art of persuasion in advertising, this
7 book is essential reading for all marketing students and academics.
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9 John O’Shaughnessy is Professor Emeritus of Business at Columbia University and
30111 Senior Associate of the Judge Institute of Management Studies at the University of
1 Cambridge. He is author of twelve books on business. Nicholas Jackson O’Shaughnessy
2 is Professor of Marketing and Communication at the University of Keele. He has
3 published in many European marketing journals and is the author of two books on
4 marketing.
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Persuasion in
Advertising
John O’Shaughnessy
and
Nicholas Jackson
O’Shaughnessy
First published 2004
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.
© 2004 John O’Shaughnessy and Nicholas Jackson O’Shaughnessy
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
O’Shaughnessy, John.
Persuasion in advertising/by J. O’Shaughnessy & N.J. O’Shaughnessy.
– 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Advertising – Psychological aspects. 2. Persuasion (Psychology)
I. O’Shaughnessy, Nicholas J. II. Title
HF5822.084 2003
659.1′01′9–dc21 2003011531
ISBN 0-203-29998-1Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-34043-4(Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0–415–32223–5 (hbk)
ISBN 0–415–32224–3 (pbk)
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Contents
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3111 List of case studies vii
4 List of advertisement examples viii
5 Preface ix
6 Acknowledgements xi
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9 1 What facilitates persuasion and what inhibits it? 1
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2 Rationality, symbolism and emotion in persuasion 25
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4 3 Persuasive advertising appeals, 1 55
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Association with social norms, values and valued images 64
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Solidarity with others 80
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Status and prestige 83
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4 Persuasive advertising appeals, 2 93
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1 Associations tied to the mental modes of seeking excitement
2 and experiencing relaxation (reversal theory) 93
3 Associations tied to positive or negative reinforcements
4 (behaviourism/conditioning) 99
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5 Persuasive advertising appeals, 3: cognitive approaches 121
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8 Hierarchy of effects models 123
9 The elaboration likelihood model 126
40111 The persuasive communication approach 130
1 Consistency theory 150
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CONTENTS
6 Persuasive advertising appeals, 4 165
Psychoanalytic psychology 166
Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET) 171
Psychology of the adaptive unconscious 173
Notes 197
Index 209

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Case studies
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3111 Stella Artois 48
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The Oxo Family 86
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Death Cigarettes 114
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9 Renault Clio 155
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Gold Blend 160
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Advertisement examples
1.1 Getting attention: Oliver Sweeney 2
1.2 Managing our perspectives: McDonald’s 22
2.1 Symbolizing the brand: Silk Cut 26
2.2 Rational argument: Pilkington Glass 46–7
3.1 The call to solidarity: Bombardier 56
3.2 Celebrity sophistication: Omega 84
3.3 Nostalgia: Panerai 85
4.1 Excitement – the paratelic mode: Oliver Sweeney 94
5.1 Creating metaphor: Ford Focus 122–3
5.2 Reconciling cognitive dissonance: BMW 154–5

viii
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Preface
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4 Effective advertising is, almost always, persuasive advertising; and advertising that
5 does not seek to persuade (relying, for example, on attention getting or repeated
6 exposure effects alone) is really missing an opportunity. In a competitive situa-
7 tion those who persuade best are those most likely to win. Persuasion is always
8 important, even where the competition is inept. This book seeks to explain how
9 advertising persuades, and sets out the strategies for advertisers to adopt. Its
20111 specific contribution is to draw out the implications for marketing managers of
1 research on persuasion done outside the field of marketing academe (for example,
2 in social psychology, linguistics and sociology) but highly relevant to it and, as
3 yet, almost invisible in the extant marketing literature.
4 This literature tends not to suggest an explanation of how advertising works,
5 providing rules without a bedrock of understanding and offering nothing by way
6 of explanatory theory. It does not make persuasion the main focus but concen-
7 trates on, for example, the management of advertising. Our argument is that
8 persuasion is the most neglected area in advertising texts. We seek to remedy

9 that literary deficiency with a more conceptual and theory-based approach. We
30111 draw on empirical research that is here, for the first time, incorporated in a
1 marketing text.
2 The extant literature of advertising seems to focus almost exclusively on the
3 functional areas, such as the construction of a campaign, media buying, budgeting,
4 testing and measurement, analysis of famous campaigns and the ideas of eminent
5 copywriters. It is, abundantly, a technical-professional literature, possibly discuss-
6 ing some psychological concepts at the margin – e.g. the Petty/Cacioppo model
7 (see p. 127) – but remaining at the applied level. Thus there are no books on
8 persuasion that are tied specifically to advertising. Most texts on marketing
9 deal implicitly with effective (read ‘persuasive’) advertising, but permeating
40111 many accounts is a general belief that we are not sure how advertising works.
1 This book explains how, by analysing persuasion in detail and then discussing
2111 strategies tied to these analyses.
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