Persuasive Advertising - J. Scott Armstrong [51]
Social proof can be elicited by showing a similar person who is engaged in the behavior that is being advertised. These similarities can be expressed in many ways, such as by beliefs, looks, dress, voice, or setting. This principle tries to establish an emotional connection.
This principle is most effective when the association is new to those in the target market. That is, they were not previously aware that people similar to them used the product. For example, I thought that there would be little reason for me to become an organ donor because of my age. When renewing my automobile driver’s license one year, I saw an ad that profiled a donor of approximately my age. Social proof worked—I signed up.
The identification can go amiss if the person in the ad does not match the target market. For example, a TV campaign in the late 1960s showed people from different ethnic groups enjoying Rheingold beer at celebrations. In one ad, the copy asked, “Why do more Chinese-Americans drink Rheingold than any other beer? We don’t know. But we must be doing something right.” The ad led to many unprintable letters and threats: “I wouldn’t drink the same beer as those */%#!”
Uninformative pictures of “typical customers” are likely to distract from an ad’s message. For example, when universities show pictures of students, they provide no information because the target market already knows what typical students look like. In July 2006, an examination of the websites of the US News and World Report’s 120 top-ranked universities revealed that 56 percent showed pictures of typical students—similar, yes, but not informative.
Reebok misused social proof in its 1988 “Reeboks let U.B.U.” commercial, which showed teenage oddballs wearing Reebok sneakers. In one example, the voice-over said, “Whoso would be a man, must be a non-conformist,” “Insist on yourself, never imitate.” Few teenagers want to be considered as oddballs.
Stewart and Furse (1986) found that most TV commercials used similar people— but many violated the principle. In addition, they found that 27 percent of TV commercials from major advertisers contained background characters that were incidental to the message. Similar findings were obtained by Stewart and Koslow (1989) and Stanton and Burke (1998).
Evidence on the effects of claiming use of the product by similar people
Three experiments on donations tested the importance of using a “similar individual” in an appeal to donate to life-saving efforts. The 672 subjects (Israeli students) were informed about either a group that was similar to them (in terms of nationality or skin color) or one that was dissimilar. The donations were immensely higher when the group was similar. The researchers then looked at the effect of focusing on a similar individual from the group (e.g., by showing a picture of an individual victim rather than a group shot of seven identified victims). The thought was that the focus on an individual would heighten the identification and lead to an emotional attachment. Donations to a similar individual were immensely higher than donations to a group of similar people. In contrast, focusing on a dissimilar individual did not lead to an attachment; in fact, it produced lower donations than did information about a group of victims. Thus, when the group was dissimilar, it was more effective to provide little information about the characteristics of the group (Kogut and Ritov 2007).
Over 600 households participated in a nine-week experiment involving La Verne, California’s curbside recycling program. The first week, all groups received a door hanger asking them to “Please try to recycle as much as possible.” Here is what happened during the intervention