Weak theory PDF

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Exam preparation note for weak theory...

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Weak theory assumes that advertising is less powerful. It is often associated with the ATR model proposed by Ehrenberg (1974 cited in Barry, 1987). The ATR (Awareness, Trial and Reinforcement) model explains the consumer behaviour as follows; after creating some awareness by ads, there are some occasions that trial purchase happens, which subsequently put those brands into their repeated repertories in some cases again (but often they return to their usually habits). For an established brand, consumers may already have been aware of it. Thus, a special effort like a new product or a new campaign (i.e. anything like new) is needed to give an opportunity for trial purchase. According to Ehrenberg (2002), salience is about the brand coming to mind in personally relevant choice situations. At the third stage of reinforcement, a brand should become salient and enter into consumer’s consideration sets, while its mechanism has not well revealed. Thus, from a marketer’s perspective, rather than persuading consumers, the role of advertising is a defensive way to give consumers a recognition of brands’ existence and reinforce their repeated buying. Only occasionally, there is something of a ‘leaky bucket’ that recruiting new buyers (Barnard and Ehrenberg, 1997). This model implies that consumers do not buy products outside from their consideration sets, meaning that habitual buying dominates most of sales. Barnard and Ehrenberg (1997) call this as “Dirichlet view”. Ashley and Oliver (2010) argues that changes in consumer media habits and their increased cynicism toward advertising, along with lower interest in advertising. Ozanne and Murray (1995)’ paper inspired by the critical theory encourage consumers to become “reflexively defiant”. It suggests that consumptions do not arise in response to our needs but the social activity that develops the critical imagination. Moreover, Adorno (1975) implies that consumers have an ability to control between engaging or seeing through ads that even highlights happy images of them. However, this changed the development and execution of advertising. It became more important to determine how to stand out in the crowd of competitors without isolating the brand from potential customers. For example,

presenting creative contents is a general approach since it can make an impactful impression compared to having a specific message that only targets specific consumers (Barnard and Ehrenberg, 1997).

Here we can say that consumers do not use advertising as a source of information as Nelson (1974) argues. With an example of fashion ads, people do not seek information embedded within the ads (Phillips and McQuarrie, 2010). Rather, they look for the story cues in an ad’s images, and they respond these elements, which can be linked with the peripheral route of ELM model. In the study of British adolescents, Ritson and Elliot (1999) suggests that they focused on the ways that consumers quoted, reinterpreted and reused ads as part of a social interactions. Thus, we can say that marketing communications aim to embed meanings in products and services as McCracken (1988) suggest about the “culturally constituted world”. This can be linked with the famous concept of uses

and

gratifications

in

advertising.

Uses and gratifications theory

presented by O’Donohoe (1994) suggests that there are not only marketing purposes of advertising but also non-marketing purposes. For instance, aspiration and role models argues that we compare our actual self with the ideal self embedded with celebrities within the advertisement. We are even utilising ads as entertainment tool derived from the source of music, humour or interesting ideas and visuals. This can be linked with a socio-cultural perspective where consumers can be regarded as active readers of advertisements and advertisements can be utilised as communication tools with others. O’Donohoe and Tynan (1998) argue that young people, for example, have literacy skills towards advertising, which means they are sceptical and aware of the persuasive function of it. This is because the intertextual nature of advertising permeated the experiences of young adults (O’Donohoe, 1997). Megaphone effect argues that bloggers without holding an institutional position can acquire a mass audience by a means of publicly consuming and posting on the web (McQuarrie et al. 2012). However, not all bloggers gain an audience; it is depending on the

appropriate taste judgements and the accumulation of cultural capital.

Socio-cultural perspective lead to an argument that practitioners are required to learn the contexts and perspectives that consumers encounter with the advertisement, while at the same time, socio-cultural theory means that one advertisement could bring several interpretations across different groups of people. Polysemy argues that this will occur depending on a consumer’s biography, cultural background, and their interests (Puntoni et al., 2010). Practitioners will suffer from understanding “the idiosyncratic nature of consumers”, while they are required to create purposeful polysemy depending on the different types of it (ibid). For example, synchronic polysemy shows that one advertisement can have different meanings, thus the messages should allow a room for consumers to make their own interpretations. Diachronic polysemy, on the other hand, brings the different messages to the same consumer, highlighting the core features of a brand is an appropriate way. However, it is also true that we are not completely

idiosyncratic

since

our

cultural

background,

nation

and

education can be generalised in some way (Mick and Buhl, 1992). In this study, there are three brothers who grew up in same backgrounds and engaged in similar experiences, while their engagement towards ads is different; there is an interplay between shared views and idiosyncratic views....