Lecture Fourteen: Involvement and Values

In this weeks lecture our aim was to:

• Understand how a person's level of involvement and degree of involvement (High/Low)affects their behaviour.


• Understand how a person's values affects their behaviour.

and finally

• Consider how Marketers can exploit this??

Consumer Involvement

Involvement is defined as - "A person's perceived relevance of the object based on their inherent needs, values, and interests"
Judith Lynne Zaichkowsky. (December 1985) Measuring the involvement construct in marketing, journal of consumer research 12: 341-52.

In the quote above, the word Object is used very loosely because the object can be anything from a product, brand or advertisement. Now from this there are 2 levels of involvement when a consumer purchases something:


High Involvement Purchase

• A high involvement purchase is a product like a car or a house where the consumer is going to be really considering all the finer points. For example you wouldn't just go and buy a house for say £500,000 because it has 4 walls, a roof and a floor. You would expect decent sized bedrooms, a couple of bathrooms and something extra that makes it worth while. When a consumer becomes involved at this level they are moving from 'Inertia' to 'Passion' and the consumer will almost become obsessed with the purchase.
  
  This also means that they will take at lot more time to make a decision, so it's a marketers job to really capture the imagination this potential consumer before the consumer even knows that they are going to make a purchase. This can be in the form of a consumer seeing a car ad in his teens and holding that dream until he can afford to buy one. Then when he has the money he will only come to you, by this time you will have a new, maybe more expensive model which he buys instead. Easy. I wish.
  
  Below is Philip Kotler's 'Buyer Decision Process' Model and the reason i have included it here is because it ties in with the high involvement purchase taking a long time. This model is supposed to be relevant to all purchase decisions but I would say that it mainly shows how consumers think during a high involvement purchase. Simply no one is going to go through all the stages when buying a chocolate bar or a tin of beans but they will when buying a house or car.
  

Low Involvement Purchase

• A low involvement purchase comes down to the level that is almost second nature to consumers. This includes most basic needs like food (beans, bread, eggs etc) which will not require the consumer to be very involved. The consumer at this level will simply lack the motivation to consider alternatives even if they may be cheaper one time, they just wont pay attention.

Below is a model which show the level of involvement in different purchase decisions from low to high:



I think this mini-model is a really good way of showing the types of purchases and where they belong in the involvement scale. So what do they mean:

• Routine - This is something that you will always buy because you need it, it becomes routine, just do it.


• Impulse - This is like a pair of shoes, you see them in the window, go in, buy them and think about it later. Spur of the moment, completely irregular.


• Routine - This will involve something that you buy regularly but don't necessarily need, like a newspaper or your morning coffe from Starbucks.


• Irregular(small) - This will be be at the higher end of the involvement scale because it takes some thought about the purchase. An engagement ring is a good example because it is a big purchase with high involvement but it's not as big of a purchase as a house.


• Irregular(large) - This will be the house, the car, the yacht and will be at the highest end of the scale with the consumer, as i have said before, becoming obsessed.

Measuring Involvement

Measuring involvement is a very useful marketing tool because you gain information about how a consumer reacts to an object. Solomon et al (2006) points out that if a TV viewer is more involved in a program they are more likely to pay attention the the ads in between. The pioneers in measuring involvement are Laurent & Kapferer (1985) who state "A consumer's level of involvement will be affected by four deciding factors." These are:

Importance of Risk(also know as 'Harvard Perceived Risk Model' or 'FTEPS)



Finance (How much does it cost.)


Time (How long of a window do you have to buy.)


Performance (Will the product do what it's supposed to do.)


Ego (How will it make you feel about yourself.)


Physical (How does it look/feel, is it safe.)


Social (How will other people think about you.)






Probability of making a bad purchase




Pleasure value of product category




Sign value of product category(symbolism)

From these four deciding factors Laurent & Kapferer then created a table of random products and scored them. The ones with the higher numbers were the products that the consumer was most involved in. These scores were ordered by Interest, Pleasure, Sign/Status, Imporisk(Importance of perceived risk.) and Proberr (Probability of making an erroneous or wrong choice.). Below is the table mentioned above:



To add to this they came up with 4 levels of involvement and how the consumers brain works, they are:

• Low: Think-Do-Feel - Tinned Beans.


• Behavioural: Do-Think-Feel - Clothes.


• Impuse: Feel-Do-Think - Chocolate.


• High: Think-Feel-Do - Car or House.

Values

"Generically speaking, a value can be defined as a belief about some desirable end-state that transcends specific situations and guides selection of behaviour."
Shalom H. Schwartz &Warren Bilsky. (1987) Toward a universal psychological structure of human values, journal of personality and social Psychology 53: 550-62.

One of the main things is not to get values and attitudes mixed up because they are not the same; yes they are the basis of how we behave in a situation but generally values are not specific to one situation. This is a very complex area when it comes to understanding the customer because two people may have the same values but for different reasons. For example if 2 men go to the gym for the simple reason to keep fit, so health reasons. However the first man is purely going to look good and he may then stop whereas the second man is there to train for a marathon. This can apply to anything but there is one person - Lynn R. Kahle who came up with 'Kahle's List of Values' which is a smaller, subsidised version of the Rokeach Value Survey (RVS). It includes the values:

• Self Respect


• Excitement


• Being well Respected


• Self-Fulfilment


• Sense of Acomplishment


• Warm Relationship with Others


• Security


• Fun & Enjoyment


• Sense of Belonging

However the List of Values (LOV) is seen as a bit of a cheap, knock off version RVS or (VALS) Values and Lifestyle Survey.

See if you can prioritise these in order of importance to you. I couldn't do it, in fact most people can't; this highlights another problem that the values list is a list of values that most of us use day by day, there is no real distinction between them. This is why the RVS and VALS are more popular. The best you are likely to do with this list is pick the main one or two that you think rule over the others. Mine are Self-Fulfilment, becoming the best I can be and a equal mix of warm relationship with others and fun & excitement.

In our lecture we also talked about time lines to highlight the fact that peoples values will differ on their age because of for example an 80 year old woman is more likely to do everything for her husband because in the 50's etc woman's place was seen to be in the home but a 20 year old has grown up in a world with feminist groups and equal rights for men and woman becoming stronger. I am now going to show you my time line which as of Friday will be 20 years.

Lecture Twelve: Gift Giving

This was our last lecture of the year and because of the run up to Christmas, Ruth decided to theme the lecture around gift giving. What we were supposed to take away from this lecture is that gift giving encompasses high-involvement purchasing for the customer. This is something that i will touch on but will be more in depth in later posts.

In the lecture we were asked to make a list of all the people that we intend to buy Christmas presents, or who we would normally buy Christmas presents for. Now I love Christmas because I love being able to give people presents when they are not expecting one like nan and my auntie etc. Next to the list of people we had to put what we felt or thought about buying presents for these people, he's a short version of my list some you can get an idea:

Mom - Easy
Sister - Easy and Fun
Girlfriend - Very, Very Hard.. Worrying a bit.
Nan - Challenging to Fun
Auntie - Easy

So you can see from the list above how the involvement levels react to which person I'm buying for, I mean yes they are all high involvement purchases but some are harder than others; for example it's hard to find something for my nan but I enjoy the challenge but when it comes to my girlfriend I panic because in my eyes it has to be perfect. This type of consumer can both be the easiest and the hardest person to market to, Why? well because it's hard because the customer (me) would be very picky when looking for the perfect gift, even something as wrapping could determine the purchase or not. On the other hand it can be easy because as long as I have the money I would pay anything for the perfect gift.

According to Pamela Danzinger "Gift shopping is the ultimate in 'emotional consumerism', since gift giving is all about emotionally connecting giver and recipient."
(Admap, (2004) The business of gifts, Issue 450: p43-46)

Now from this quote I love the use of 'emotional consumerism' because the emotion part is where the high involvement comes in, after all if there was no emotion involved in the purchase decision there would not be much involvement. Now below is an image of Kotler's Buyer Decision Process:

The reason why I am showing you this is because it is a good way to show how a customer thinks when they are going through a high involvement purchase. I will speak about this more in later posts but the basics is that the customer realises they need something, they shop around, buy the product and then evaluate their purchase decision.

Something else which also interests me about the way customers think when buying gifts is when it comes to what part of the brain deals with what the whole left vs. right brain. Now when it comes to selecting the store to buy the gift from, it is all controlled by the left brain, choosing the best stores, the one you know etc and then as you'd imagine the actually gift choice is decided by the right side which deals in random functions, spontaneity and impulse. There are also a set of almost tick boxes that must all be ticked off in order for us to buy a gift, they are:

Would the Recipient like this gift? - This is probably the hardest out of them because naturally customers will not think that the recipient will like their gift until they actually open it and the customer can see the reaction of the recipient.

What would the Customer like to give? - This comes down the the customers own personality, for instance a impulsive person is more likely to give a gift that is completely random where as say a more practical person would be more likely to give a girt that has a more practical application.

What is the occasion? - This does pretty much explain it self because you may by a gift for a house-warming that you wouldn't buy for a birthday.

What is my budget? - Simple if you haven't got the money you cannot buy the gift. However if you can find it cheaper else where then you can :).

From this you can get a good idea of gift giving and why we do it. In the last couple of decades we have changed from what was know as a cocoon society of consumers when we mainly focused of buying things for ourselves to make us happy but now we have moved away from that and started feeling the benefits from giving to others and im sure it will only continue to grow.

Lecture Eleven: Memory and Heuristics

Today's lecture was about Memory and Heuristics because, as marketers/advertisers, understanding how these can been manipulated is a very effective way of getting your brand into the consumers mind and making it stay there. Its all about obtaining Brand Loyalty from the consumer. To start off there are these definitions:

• Memory
  
  
  The collection of information gained, such as the mental image of an experience, from past learning or experience that is stored in a person's mind.


• Heuristics
  
  
  Trial-and-error procedure for solving problems (or reaching an unclear goal) through incremental exploration, and by employing a known criteria to unknown factors.

From these 2 definitions you get a better sense of how they can be of use to marketers and advertisers. These definitions to me suggest that Heuristics is a way of selecting products by running then past a set of criteria, made up from past experiences and memories of that product or similar products. It is basically a set of short-cuts of the mental processes we use every time me make a purchase decision. Then Memory is the storage and recollection of these experiences.


Now to understand how they fit in with the marketing world we need to understand where they fit in with marketing theories. With Kotler's very famous 'Buyer Decision Process' we can see that memory and heuristics would be a part of the 2nd and 3rd stages; this is 'Information Search' and 'Evaluation of alternatives'. Heuristics serves these stages by providing the short cuts needed to speed up the process. For instance if you needed to buy some new shoes and you knew that your local shoe shop would have shoes in you like then you stop searching for alternative location right there and then. Solomon et al. (2206) sees these short cuts as "assumptions that act as substitutions for prolonged information search.". Now these sets of criteria can range from general (High Price = High Quality or Buy the same brand as last time.) to more specific (Buy the same brand of sugar mother always did.)However they do have a negative because if people you know have had problems with a certain product then you may disregard that product without really thinking about it, as Solomon points out they are assumptions.


The other thing that needs pointing out with Kotler's model is mainly a way of optimising the purchase decision, this does not mean that it satisfy the consumer, after all its satisfaction the consumer will ultimately want right. We in Heuristics there is something know as 'Fast and Frugal Heuristics' which basically states "Making quick decisions when there is a lot of choice." (Williams 2001) Developed by Williams himself he came to understand that there was an internal set of rules within the consumer mind that we go through to aid a purchase decision; know as Heuristic Rules they consist of 4 aspects which trigger a consumer to buy into a brand or product, they are:

• Recognition - This is where you will buy a product based on a Brand you already know over a new brand.
  (Branding)


• Minimalist - Recognition +1 more criteria such as nice packaging or good slogan/name.
  (Advertising)


• Take the Last - Buying the product simply because you used it last time and it works.
  (Habbit)


• Take the Best - assessing the options in order of perceived importance of criteria.
  (Branding/Unique Selling Point)

Understanding these allow marketers to manipulate them with there very own little kit for adapting heuristics:

Pricing - Making items cheaper make them the best value for money.
Promotion - Adding freebies of BOGOF offers act as incentives to consumers.
Novelty - It's a brand new item (such as iphone) or is in fasion.
Variety - Something new and different (Chocolate and Chilli Walkers).
Herd - Because it is the most popular.

Using these the ultimate aim of the marketer is to get the adverts and the brands into the consumers mind, "the objective is to have the reader or viewer learn something …. and remember what he learned“ (Britt 1955) and “our ultimate aim is to teach them brand loyalty” (Rice 1997). To get the consumer to learn and ultimately remember your brand you need to understand the ways in which they learn and there are 2 processes within the learning theory:

Behaviourist Approach

This theory of learning works on the basis of the consumers being triggered by a stimulus. Have you ever thought "Why do I have that annoying jingle in my head" and every time you hear you remembered the product associated with that jingle. Well thats because the jingle was designed to stick the product in your head and from then on remind you of that product whenever you hear it, you don't even have to see the advert, just hear the jingle. Now with this theory it is understood that leaning is how our behaviour changes through conditioning and 2 types of conditioning were found:

Classical Conditioning

Developed by Ivan Pavlov, who wanted to understand and study reflexes, he used dogs because he wanted to know why the dogs in his lab drooled even though there was no food. He found that they drooled every time the dogs saw lab coats as the person who brought food wore a lab coat. He then started conditioning the dogs by ringing a bell every time the food came... when he then rang the bell the dogs would drool without there being any food, thus being conditioned into an action when a specific stimulus or stimuli is used. (Learning through Association)



Operant Conditioning

Developed by B.F Skinner looked more at how the reinforcement of reward or punishment affected behaviour; basically learning by doing something and seeing if the result is good or bad. For example there is a saying that says "you will only touch a hot iron once." this is because if you are told not to touch it because it's hot when you are a kid you will still touch it. Now because when you touch it you get punished by the searing hot pain as you get burnt you learn never to touch it again, simple. The one thing to understand with Skinner's theory is that it will not be considered a punishment/reward if the punisher/rewarder does not noticeably change the behaviour of the person. (Learning through Action)

Cognitive Learning

As a development from Gestalt psychologist Cognitive Learning understand the human mind as a complex and ordered system of memories and experiences that are stored in either the long-term or the short-term memory. It points out that where as behaviourism relies too much on the behavioural traits of the consumer; Cognitive Learning wants to open up the black box of the human mind and understand it as an information processor, much like a computer. Under this theory there are 2 ways in which consumers solve problems:

Latent Learning

Defined as "Learning that is not the result of determined effort and is not evident at the time it occurs, but remains latent until a need for it arises." (Freedictionary.com)and a good example is the Ronseal advert because you remember "It does exactly what it says on the tin." but you wont think of it until say you were staining your fence. Latent Learning is how we learn by what we are told either by the media or other people.



Observational Learning

Defined as "Learning that occurs as a function of observing, retaining and, in the case of imitation learning, behaviour executed by others.". So it basically means that you will learned based on what you observe others to do. This means if you see your neighbour with a brand new lawnmower and you can see it works well, when you need a new one your are likely to go for that particular make or model. Another example is if Mom always bought one brand of washer powder when you were a kid you are likely to use it in your life. These observations can be kept as long as they are needed.

Memory

Now that I have told you how we learn we can move onto how we enter, store and retrieve this information in our memories. Within memory there are 3 stages after the input of information from external sources:

Encoding - This is where information is encoded with triggers so that it can be stored. These triggers will then allow the information to be retrieved at a later date.
Storage - This is the process of actually storing the now encoded information into the memory, either short-term or long-term.
Retrieval - This is where the memory is found and brought back to the conscience mind by triggers encoded in the initial memory when it was encoded. It is then decoded and experienced.

The triggers that allow use to remember things can be anything from textures, to colours, sounds and returning to the place where the memory was first experienced. Now the way to clearly understand how our memory does this we need to think of our minds as a normal desktop computer. Our file 'experience' is put into a folder or 'Knowledge Structure' which is associated to other memories in the file, it will then be put into it's own sub-folder or 'node' which is linked to the main folder. These folders are then linked together and triggers are set to each folder 'knowledge structure' which would then be trigger by stimuli that was in the original experience.

and finally....

Nostalgia

Nostalgia id defined as "a wistful desire to return in thought or in fact to a former time in one's life, to one's home or homeland, or to one's family and friends; a sentimental yearning for the happiness of a former place or time: a nostalgia for his college days." (dictionary.com).

The way I see nostalgia is memories that although make us happy to remember also have a darker side, much like the thorns on a rose, because although the memory is good it may remind us of how bad the time now is or that it wont ever happen again. Generally Nostalgia occurs more in the older generations and this is simply because they have already experienced 50% of their lives and as the saying goes, your best years are between the ages of 18 and 24; purely because they are the times when you were most free and had money to do things and no commitments. For me my feeling of nostalgia comes from my holiday to Laganas, Zante last year. This is because it was the best summer holiday I've ever had and me and my 7 mates were all together. So that is the good side, remembering all the good times we had. The dark side for now is that I wont go on another holiday like that ever again, since last year many of us have lost contact and moved on.

Laganas, Zante ... June 23rd (Day One)2008


Now it is because that memories that have nostalgic powers that are very powerful tools to use in adverts because if you as a marketer can trigger that nostalgic memory, you will also trigger the happiness of the memory, which in turn tricks the viewer into thinking the product associated to the ad will bring them that same happiness.

As it is Christmas soon.. Here are some Christmas Advert Examples... ENJOY!! and HAPPY CRISTMAS

Examples

Lecture Ten: Gender Responses to Direct Marketing and Charity Campaigns

Now we all know advertising is about reaching as many people within your target audience as possible. To achieve this however you need to understand how they respond to advertisements and better still understand how Men and Women as different groups respond to advertisements. This weeks lesson was about gender differences in response to direct mail and with this was also used to tie in our Integrated Charities Assignment; we could then use the information from this lesson when thinking about what charity would would most appeal to our target audience, students aged 18-24.

To start off Ruth showed us the advertisements below and we all had to say what we felt about the advert.



- As a class we came to the result that although the use of Sean Bean's voice was very clever, as it is a very distinctive and recognisable voice, the actual advert itself lacked impact and many of us got bored quickly.



- This advert became very disturbing for a couple of members within our group as they have lost family members to cancer. However the general feel of the class was too heavy and is too focused on getting people emotionally but for me that it is exactly what is needed... even if it is so impact full it is what is needed to get people's attention.



- The final advert was one for giving blood which has a personal link to me because I have been giving blood ever since I have been able too. The group found that this advert was probably the most influential because it gave you straight facts and the slogan "save a life... Give Blood" is simple and sticks in your mind.
____________________________________________________________________________________

Moving on from our own views within the class room I want to look at some of the theory that is out there. One of the strongest theories is from Schiebe and Condry (1984) who examined advertisements according to product type and found major gender differences in the values promoted in advertisements. The found that:

- That advertisements aimed at women portrayed beauty and youth.


Where as,


- Advertisements aimed at men showed physical strength and ambition.

I now have 2 different adverts for deodorant, just see if you can see the differences Schiebe and Condry found.





I would then just like to leave you with a link to an article written by 2 university psychology students about Gender Differences in Memory and Self-Esteem for Advertising

Enterprise Week (Week 09)

Well welcome again to my blog and as the title suggests this weeks blog is about Enterprise Week. Enterprise Week is a series of talks and competitions that run from today, the 17th November to 22nd and I have just taken some time to talk about the 3 lectures that were aimed specifically for the Business, Marketing and Advertising students and Bucks. I am aiming to give you a brief of what they were like and then my final added thoughts. Enjoy.

Lecture One: What Next? Experts from the world of advertising and marketing come together to discuss the challenges for the industry in the next decade.
(11:30am - 12:45pm @ the CLT - Chalfont Campus)

This lecture was structured very similarly to Question Time, which you may have seen on the BBC, where you have a panel of speakers from the relevant industry or sector who come together and answer a series, in this case 7, of questions in this particular industry. Now here is the panel for the lecture:
______________________________________________________________________________________

Ivor Peters - Managing Director of Primal PR under the BWP Group.

Jamie Matthews - Managing Director of Initials Marketing (Up for agency of the year).

Andrew Canter - Founder of Contentworx.

Don Cowley - Panel Chairman

Steve Cox - UK Marketing Director for Titan Outdoor UK.

Allan Rich - Founder of MediaCom and now a Non-Executive Director of the Cello Group.

Jayne Barr - Runs Creative Consulting.

Rob Laurence - Marketing and new Product Development Director at TGI.
_______________________________________________________________________________________

Now the lecture started with 2 of our 3rd year students, Luke Burr and Rob Millett, talking about the topic for their dissertations shortly followed by Don Cowley introducing the panel and kicking off the discussion.

One of the questions which I thought was very relevant to us, as current students, was the very first question asked by Rob Millett. He asked:

How do you think the recession will affect the PR and Advertising industries and how will they counteract it, for their clients and their own businesses?

Now the reason I think this question is relevant because although I am a first year student and if I am lucky I will come out with my Degree at the tail end of the recession. Currently however, where we are very much at the beginning of a recession, the answers given by the panel came off as a sence of reassurance by basically stating that as long as the agencies and business are run properly they will stand strong through the recession. Allan Rich put some points across like the big agencies will now only pay attention to what they do best, the budget wont change but the strategies will and just that they will stick will the big brands.

Lecture Six: Gendre Responses to Advertising

In todays lecture we talked about our upcomming perception experiment assignment. We had an example test produced by Ruth to show us how to evaluate our experiment. The test was in 3 sections which all consisted of a series of pictures on a PowerPoint presentation.

The first section was a selection of 14 different print advertisments and we were shown each one for about 3-5 seconds. After all the pictures had been shown to us Ruth asked which one of the 14 print ads was most prominent in our minds by naming each one n we had a show of hands. The one most recognised generally by the class was the Nissan advert. We decided that this was mainly due to the fact that there was a large section of block colour to draw the eye in and then there were only two lines of writing which was easy to read.

The second section was this time a collection of 10 male focused advertisements, all print ads again. Again, in a group, we were asked which advert was most prominent. This time however we discussed how the advert is focused at the male population. we come to some conclusions that males prefer darker colours in their adverts like blacks, greys, browns and blues etc and that they generally remember adverts that are funny. However out of the 10 ads 90% of the females in the class remembered the Paco-Rebarno advert simply because it was a picture of a toned and semi-clothed man. Most of the males in the class though remembered an advert with a joke in it.

Then the final section was again 10 print advertisements but to contrast the second section they were all female focused. The first ad was of a man frozen outside in the snow holding a beer to keep it cold whereas there are a pair of female legs in the sauna. Now we found out that the men found out that the advert was for beer first because of the logo in the corner but in contrast the woman had noticed that there was a man outside whereas the males in the group missed that.

The aim of this lesson was to prove that men and woman are targeted differently with print and video ads aimed specifically at one sex. I also found this interesting post which is a good read:

Men vs. Women

Lecture Five: Personality or Self Concept

First off I will be completely honest with you. I wasn't able to attend this weeks lecture, but and it's a good but, i read all of the lecture notes and got some notes off my friend so hopefully this weeks post should make some sense :)

This weeks lecture was all about peoples personalities and self-concepts and how marketers and advertising agencies prey on this to get you and me to buy into a particular product or brand.

The definition of personality according to the Oxford online dictionary is:

The characteristics or qualities that form an individual’s character.

Now from a marketing/advertising perspective this doesn't really sound relevant to use as a basis for an ad campaign or marketing scheme. If you compare this to the definition of Self-Concept:

The mental image or perception that one has of oneself.

You should be able to see that from a marketing point of view self-concept is easier to manipulate than personality. Someone's self-concept can be changed simply by making them think or feel as if they NEED a particular product to be the person they see themselves to be and in most cases want to be. This point is made more apparent when Solomon et al (2001) suggests that People see themselves as they imagine other people see them. So this means that you have 2 very different views but essentially they are both valuable to a marketer. I would however just like to take a minute to break the whole 'self-concept' concept down as it comes in 3 parts:

• Self Image - This is the kind of person we think we are.


• Ideal Self - This is the kind of person we would like to be.


• Self Esteem - This is whether you actually like yourself and is determined by looking and seeing if your Self Image matches that of your Ideal Self.

It is very common though for the consumer's Self Image to be very far away from there ideal self and with the fact that "72% of men and 85% of women are unhappy with at least one aspect of their appearance" (Goleman, D. (1991).).

Its because of this high percentage of unhappy people that marketers prey on. At the end of the day if a woman is unhappy with the way she looks you can sell her make-up which you tell her will make her look 18 again, when we all really know it wont but consumers buy into it anyway... anything that you can sell to a consumer on the basis that it will help them towards their ideal self will fly off the shelves. Yes you can argue it is immoral but at the end of the day business is ruthless and it is just business. Now I will cover this in more detail in later posts but this ties in very nicely with Mazlow's Hierarchy of Need because the top 2 parts of the triangle are esteem and self-actualisation; so after all the other need for humans is fulfilled then we actually begin to look inwards at our selves and begin to asses whether we are actually what we aim and want to be.

Please have a look - http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?index=2&did=1464131531&SrchMode=1&sid=3&Fmt=3&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=PQD&TS=1238594670&clientId=25802

Certain advertisements can be used by Marketers and Advertisers to trigger what is know as 'Social-Comparison' by which the consumer, triggered by the ad, begins to compare themselves to that of the people in the advert. This as you can see gives Marketers and Advertisers a controlling factor over any of their consumers who can potentially be trigger by the advert. [Journal]
Moving on from just the concept of Social-Comparison we also have the consumption factor... 'You are what you consume' Solomon et al (2006). This is the next step up from when I was mentioning Self-Concept earlier and suggests that "A consumers exhibits attachment to an object to the extent that it is used by that person to maintain his or her self-concept." (Douglas, B. H. & Thompson, J. C. (2004).). This is because people will make there first judgements on what a person wares, the car they drive, whether they eat a salad or a steak at dinner; all these things add up and make a pre-perception of a person before they have even spoke.

In summary the whole self-concept theory is the stronger weapon for marketers and advertisers as they can manipulate the self-concept of a consumer through social-comparison theory and coerce them into buying products that they don't really need and are probably above their budget.

Finally here is an ad that I think fit in here. :)





_______________________________________________________________________________________

PERSONALITY

I would like to start talking about a persons personality by starting with a definition by Schiffman and Kanuk (2004) which states a persons personality is:

Those inner psychological characteristics that both determine and reflect how a person responds to his or her environment.

This is a good quote however I personally think that a person's personality stretches further than that; it's not just the inner makings but it must involve how people react and interact with other people and how we deal with different situations. This is covered in more detail by Hollander's research which gives 4 different sections to a person's personality. These are:

• The External Aspect: how a person interacts with other people.


• The Internal Aspect: a combination of their values & attitudes.


• The Dynamic Aspect: faced with a new situation how do they behave e.g. social adjustments.


• The Consistent Aspect: their characteristic style.

We then can use these four sections as a basis for personality traits, whether someone is outgoing or not etc. From this Cattell’s Trait Theory of Personality was born with 16 traits which you are either one or the other of. They are:

Reserved--------------------------------Outgoing
Less Intelligent------------------------More Intelligent
Affected by feelings--------------------Emotionally Stable
Humble----------------------------------Assertive
Serious---------------------------------Happy-go-lucky
Expedient-------------------------------Conscientious
Restrained------------------------------Venturesome
Tough-minded----------------------------Tender-minded
Trusting--------------------------------Suspicious
Practical-------------------------------Imaginative
Forthright------------------------------Shrewd
Self-assured----------------------------Apprehensive
Conservative----------------------------Experimenting
Group-dependent-------------------------Self-sufficient
Uncontrolled----------------------------Controlled
Relaxed---------------------------------Tense

Form this starting point other people have conducted questionnaires using the traits and have come up with 4 pairs of 2 letter of which you can only be one or the other. These then make many different 4 letter codes which can tell your, in detail, what your personality type is. Each pair belongs to a specific section and they are as follows:

Pair One: Direction of your energy force

• E (Extroversion) - Deals with things, people and situations.


• I (Introversion) - Deals with studying ideas, information, explanations and beliefs.

Pair Two: Information Processing

• S (Sensing) - You prefer to deal with facts, what you know.


• N (Intuition) - You prefer ideas, looking into the unknown, looking at possibilities.

Pair Three: Making Decisions

• T (Thinking) - You decide on the basis of logic, using an analytic and detached approach.


• F (Feeling) - You decide using values and/or personal beliefs, letting.

Pair Four: Organizing your life

• J (Judging) - You prefer your life to be planned in a stable and organised way.


• P (Perceiving) - You prefer to go with the flow, to maintain flexibility and respond to events.

As a fun added activity for the lecture Ruth asked us to complete this questionnaire which uses these four pairs. The questionnaire is a more comprehensive version on the Myer Briggs test and was created by Carl Jung.

My results came out to be ENFP so straight away this means that my strongest tendencies are Extrovert, Intuition, Feeling and Perceiving however I was not convinced that 1 try would be sufficient so I waited a week and took the test again and this time I came out as a ESFP which is not surprising as I will have probably answered the questions depending on how I felt that day.

I then decided that I wanted to take another personality test that Ruth had mentioned, this one can be found here and my result was ENTJ which again is different which still just reinforces my idea that although the questionnaires are a good start they are not 100% accurate as the answers are controlled by the feeling of that person at that particular time of the test.

Although they were different each time I did see that they generally all had something in common (The fact that they all started with E) so they can give some good information. Studying consumer's personalities however helps marketers to aim brands at different people's personalities. This is where Brand Personality Framework (Aaker, J. (1997).) comes in. Brand Personality is defined as:

The attribution of human personality traits (seriousness, warmth, imagination, etc.) to a brand as a way to achieve differentiation. Usually done through long-term above-the-line advertising and appropriate packaging and graphics.
(MarketingWeb.com)

Below is a list of common attributes that advertisers use in ads to target specific people:


Now the selection of these attributes is what advertisers need to decide when coming up with an advertisement. Here are some examples I have found.

• Sincerity & Excitement.

• Excitement, Sophistication & Ruggedness.

• Ruggedness, Competence & Sophistication.