Persuasive Advertising - J. Scott Armstrong [64]
Even small lies can be costly. Qantas Airways advertised travel to Australia by showing an airline seat resting on a lovely beach, “You’ll feel like you’re in Australia as soon as you’re on Qantas.” Actually, the ad showed the Lanikai beach in Hawaii. The Sydney Telegraph Mirror wrote, “If Qantas’ advertising agency can’t raise the energy to come to Australia, why should anyone else bother?” Given the complaints, Qantas pulled the ad.
One solution is to ask each person involved in the content in an advertising campaign to sign an ethical statement. Preferably it should be one that is endorsed by the agency.
Evidence on the effects of standards on ethical behavior
When dealing with everyday problems, we sometimes forget to reflect on our standards. Thus, many people steal from their employer and students often cheat. So what happens when people think about their ethical standards? In one experiment, 229 subjects were given an opportunity to falsify a report on how well they did on a task involving answering a series of questions. Most of those in the control groups cheated, not a whole lot, but to some extent. However, some subjects had been asked to write as many of the Ten Commandments as they could just prior to taking the test. How many of them cheated? None. This occurred even though some students could only remember one or two commandments. Interestingly, when another group of students was asked to predict the outcome of this experiment, they expected cheating in the control group but they did not think that the Ten Commandments task would have an effect. In another study using the same type of task, cheating did not occur for those subjects who were first asked to sign a statement on the answer sheet that “I understand that this study falls under the MIT [Yale] honor system.” As it happens, neither MIT nor Yale has an honor code (Mazar, Amir, and Ariely 2008).
3.3. Self-expression
When everyone is somebody, then no one’s anybody.
Gilbert and Sullivan, The Gondoliers
In contrast to social proof, prestige is the desire to be special. Yogi Berra echoed this in his description of Toots Shor’s nightclub, a former hangout for celebrities: “No one goes there any more. It’s too crowded.”
We purchase some products primarily to impress others. A prominently displayed brand name or label can be the major difference between a $2,000 Prada handbag and a similar $20 no-name bag. By paying much more for a brand name, we make a statement to others and to ourselves about who we are. We express ourselves through clothing, jewelry, art, music, and educational degrees. It is typical practice for advertisers to tap into customers’ need for self-expression.
One of the more famous examples of self-expression advertising is a 1923 automobile print ad. While car companies usually focused on advertising their product’s features, the Jordan Playboy car used emotion. The story goes that the owner of the Jordan Motor Car Company conceived the ad as he looked out of a train window, saw a woman on a horse chasing the train, and asked a friend, “Where are we?” The answer was, “West of Laramie.” The ad then went into poetic detail in describing this “bronco-busting steer-roping girl” who “loves the cross of the wild and the tame,” and concludes that the Jordan Playboy was built for her. Ogilvy thought this ad was absurd because it did not give the reader a single fact. However, because the Jordan Playboy car had no comparative advantage, an emotional appeal might have been a the best they could do.1
Self-expression themes became important in the U.S. advertising in the 20th century (Pope 1983). A 1928 ad by a steamship line illustrates this principle: “Crossing in the Aquitania carries as much prestige as twenty letters of introduction…!”
3.3.1. Show how the product allows customers to express their personalities
Because personalities differ and people see themselves as unique, the use of self-expression involves tailoring ads to subgroups. For example, when soccer star