Persuasive Advertising - J. Scott Armstrong [58]
The converse also applies. If you want to discourage behavior, associate it with unfavorable things. Thus, to convince people to avoid smoking, littering, or pollution, an unfavorable association can be effective.
It is risky for advertisers to associate their products with unfavorable things. For example, Coca-Cola has built its advertising around the association of Coke with favorable images. However, two of its ads in the early 2000s broke this pattern. In a TV commercial, actress Penelope Cruz guzzled a Coke and then belched. And in the “101-year old Grandma” commercial, the scene opened with an emotional setting for a family reunion; however, when grandma learns that there is no Coke, she goes berserk and disrupts the gathering.
A common-enemy approach might help when choice is limited. Find something that the target market does not like and show that your product is dissimilar. The most appropriate situations for this are political campaigns or public interest advertising. I do not recommend it for commercial advertising.
Oslo Sporveier, the public transport system in Oslo, Norway, used the common-enemy approach. Its TV commercial showed a middle-aged man’s hat blowing off. As he runs for the hat, a young punk who is driving by in a convertible deliberately swerves to run over the hat. Shortly after, the middle-aged man is riding the tram, and the punk’s car is parked too close to the tracks. The tram smashes past the car to the delight of the man. Employees and customers enjoyed defeating a common enemy, people who park on the tram tracks.
Again, the common-enemy approach is dangerous for commercial products. In 1985, Burger King ran a TV campaign featuring Herb the Nerd, a character who was so odd that he could not even find Burger King. The campaign’s message was that you, the viewer, are not like Herb; thus, you will like Burger King. This campaign attracted much attention. However, Kanner (2004) summarized critics’ responses as, “the most elaborate advertising flop of the decade.”
Evidence on the effects of favorable and relevant images
Our analysis of quasi-experimental data suggested that the effects of this principle are weak. Furthermore, we only found evidence for low-involvement products:
Low-involvement print ads with favorable associations had better recall. Our WAPB analysis found 17 pairs of low-involvement print ads in which one ad associated the product with favorable and relevant images, while the other ad did not attempt to link the product with an image. Recall for the favorable ads was 1.04 times better than for the other ads.
In an analysis of the non-experimental data in WAPB, we found that in comparison with the industry norms for each ad, the average persuasion score for the 42 ads using favorable associations for low-involvement products was 5 percent higher than the comparable score for the 46 ads without favorable associations.
2.6. Authority
In a series of lab experiments, a researcher asked subjects to send an electric shock to a victim if he answered incorrectly to a question in a “learning test.” (This victim was actually a part of the experimental team and was not receiving real shocks.) The subjects could not see the victim, but they could hear his screams. If the subjects questioned whether they should continue, the experimenter said, “It is essential that you continue.” Two-thirds of the subjects obeyed instructions to send increasingly strong shocks to the victim until it reached the maximum of 450-volt shocks. Many of these subjects thought that their subjects