Written - The psychology of advertising - notes

• Page 6. Advertisement does have its place in society, both at an aggregate and an individual level. In contemporary industrialized societies, advertising serves several functions: facilitating competition, communicating with consumers about products and services, funding public mass media and other public resources, creating jobs and informing and persuading the individual consumer. 
• pg6. Advertising is the prime, and perhaps only, means companies have to inform consumers about new and existing products. 
• 6. Advertising is a key source of funding for major mass media in the US and many other countries. Newspapers, TV, radio and certainly many free services on the internet (e.g search engines such as Google or AltaVista) would not exist if it were not for advertising expenditures. 
• 6. There is one basic motive for an advertiser to use an informational appeal: to communicate something new and potentially relevant about a product, service or idea. At first glance, this would imply that the information function is primarily used for new product or service introductions, but reality appears more complex than that.
• Pg 12. Cognitive consumer responses are beliefs and thoughts about brands, products and services that consumers generate in response to advertising. They include the 'traditional' ad effectiveness indices such as brand awareness and brand (and product) recall and recognition, as well as newly formed associations about products and brands which are sometimes a function of the persuasive information (i.e persuasive arguments) encountered in advertising. 
• *pg 17 Source attractiveness. A source variable that has also received much attention is source attractiveness. Many products are sold by appealing to sexual attraction and physical beauty. Sometimes these appeals make sense, for example when selling cosmetics or perfumes where an attractive model directly supports the claim of the product to enhance one's attractiveness, but sometimes they do not as when a car dealer advertises a new model by placing an attractive female model on the bonnet. Nevertheless, there is reason to believe that using a physically attractive source may be a wise thing to do for the advertiser. * (IMAGE TIPALET BLOW IN HER FACE AND SHELL FOLLOW YOU ANYWHERE)
• 196. There was general agreement among early social psychologists that human behaviour is guided by social attitudes.