Advertising's 15 Basic Appeals

Toilet paper ads are all about the aesthetic sensation of softness.

And even consoles are pretty much built to an audience they've already assessed through market research, so the advertising is not 'hey, we're better' but 'hey, you are already the people who will buy this, remember who we are'.

xpost to myself again.

The adverts on the Tube for all those crime novels are hilariously similar to each other to the extent where you know they're all in league, even sometimes saying 'Liked Jack Reacher? You will also like..' and generally looking to present nothing more than a one-word hook, usually the author's surname.

"sway" is the wrong word. if your messaging is consistent then yes, consumers will begin to associate the foregrounded qualities with your product or service. but that's about POSITIONING, not ADVERTISING. e.g. the two leading brands of detergent will want to carve out slightly different personalities.

and yes, you can potentially squeeze more value out of your media buy with creative that's particularly memorable, but maintaining a "memorable" campaign over the long haul is very difficult. the more memorable your creative, the faster it gets stale.

really the only sort of advertising that can "sway" a consumer is retail-oriented stuff: "big sale right now!" and the extent of that "persuasion" will be to e.g. have someone who's already in the market for your product or service consider purchasing now rather than later.

ultimately, advertising is a vehicle for AWARENESS. for commodity goods in mature markets, it's about awareness of positioning ("this is what i'm about!"). for differentiated goods in growing markets there will be a greater focus on a) "i exist!" and b) "these are my features/benefits"

Aha, so the 'appeals' are just the existing sine qua nons of the product sought, and adverts may as well take them for granted...

This is all fabulously depressing...like, even more depressing than I had thought. You're a wise fella - have you ever studied this stuff properly?

I mean, people (including me) talk about how spot on some of the Marmite campaigns have been, but the fact is they don't have any competition. They could just have a black screen with the word 'Marmite' flashing up on it and it would work as well. Often the artistry of advertising is a luxury that simply keeps purportedly creative types in jobs and nothing more.

(I have to admit, for an out and out socialist/communist, I do love a lot of adverts. But aside from the ones that are made by over enthusiastic people who get it horrendously and offensively wrong, they really don't matter at all.)

Yeah, they don't, really, but I still find the urge to havoc rising when I hear militaristic, objectifying shit like the latest Lynx campaign (well, any Lynx campaign) - it may not make any difference to how the product is sold but it promotes neolithic attitudes

You really think that advertising doesn't work? All of the evidence of its effectiveness is b.s.?

No, I know it works.

What about our goddamn need for sleep? Why the hell isn't that in the list?

who said it doesn't work? it absolutely works. just not like that. advertisers would kill to be anywhere near as insidiously effective as folks seem to think they are.

lj - let's just say i'm not thinking about this stuff from an armchair.

I was referring to emily's "they really don't matter at all". I thought she was saying that ads were ineffective and therefore irrelevant beyond any aesthetic interest they may have.

ah. i do agree with emil.y that the content is secondary to their mere presence. obv. you can get the creative spectacularly wrong or stunningly right but basically just being there is the important thing.

So Fowles considers Sex a "biological need," but Sleep a "psychological need"? WTF I'm not voting!

I can't agree with that at all. Maybe it's true for a commodity, but not for most products.
xpost

okay

16. Need to change channels to a station that's not currently showing commercials.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

By the way, I thought about this after posting (above) and decided that it might make sense to consider sex = biological and sleep = psychological because maybe an ad can arouse us sexually but cannot cause us to go through the biological process of sleeping. Not like I'm going to read Fowles to see if this is the intended distinction.

I was referring to emily's "they really don't matter at all". I thought she was saying that ads were ineffective and therefore irrelevant beyond any aesthetic interest they may have.

― wk, Friday, 8 October 2010 08:30 (5 days ago)

Only just saw this - that's pretty much the opposite of what I was saying. I'm agreeing with rogermexico here.

i mean i dunno it's one rung down the moral ladder from conning old people out of their life savings imo