How does advertising work? Consider Chris’ selection of beer. Chris has seen an ad for Corona beer that shows a boat on a tranquil sea. There are people on the boat, but the viewer only hears them. Corona beer is shown bathed in ice. Chris thinks of Mexico because Corona is produced in Mexico and because the water is reminiscent of an Acapulco beach. The ad reminds Chris of Bill, who always orders Corona with a lemon when they go to a bar. When Chris orders beer these thoughts about Corona are used to remember the brand. This route to persuasion is conceptual. It relies on Chris’ associations to Corona beer.

In contrast to Chris’ reliance on largely self-constructed associations to Corona, Jan’s selection of beer is perceptual. When purchasing beer, Jan relies on the fact that Corona comes in a taller bottle than other beers and Corona’s glass is clear so you can see the golden yellow beer through the bottle. These brand cues are used to choose Corona. In developing a description of how advertising works, we shall consider both the conceptual and perceptual routes to persuasion.

The Conceptual Route to Persuasion

Acceptance is Primary. Consumers attempt to make judicious choices in the marketplace. To do so, they are generally willing to process advertising information that is newsworthy or relevant. There is emerging evidence that when information seems relevant, people accept the advertising message as a means of understanding the information presented (Gilbert, American Psychologist, 1991). They may scrutinize it further in relation to other information they have stored in memory to determine whether to unaccept a message advocacy. This view is different from the conventional belief that people first comprehend information and then decide whether or not to accept it.

Acceptance Requires Memory Organization. Acceptance implies that information is represented more or less faithfully in a repository called short-term memory. Short-term memory is what you are thinking about at the moment. To be remembered and used as a basis for decision making, this information needs to receive additional processing. This additional processing takes the form of associations between the information presented in an ad and consumers’ prior knowledge of a brand. This associative process is referred to as cognitive elaboration (or rehearsal), which helps represent information in long-term memory, the repository of all knowledge.

Information stored in long-term memory is organized by meaning. This organization is hierarchical. A brand is associated in memory with a category, which in turn is associated with some higher order category (Coke, soft drink, beverage). This organization provides a logic for a brand awareness measure of ad effectiveness, which involves asking the category association for a brand (What is Coke?). It also provides a rationale for what is called top-of-mind awareness (TOM), which involves asking the brand associations for a category (What brands come to mind/ would you consider when thinking about soft drinks?).

Organization in terms of meaning involves not only a hierarchical linkage between brand and category, but also an association between brand and benefits. Benefits can have their bases in attributes, or people and occasions. When it is the latter, the approach is image based. Positioning can be construed in terms of the memory organization notions. The relation between brand and category is what we have referred to as category membership. The attribute and image based benefits represent the point of difference. The fact that many attributes or images can be used to imply a benefit is used to sustain advertising over time. This is achieved by changing the attributes or image that imply some benefit in successive executions of a campaign. For example, TWA might attempt to sustain a position that it is the convenient airline by promoting the fact that it offers on-time service, curbside check-in, and electronic ticketing.

Long-term memory is also organized to record events or episodes temporally. This organizational property is the basis for creative executions that take the form of problem-episode-outcome. Creative executions often make use of this grammar, and it is particularly effective with children under 6 who have relatively limited organization in terms of meaning.

Elaboration is Critical to Acceptance and Persuasion. Because memory is organized in terms of meaning and episodes, this knowledge is often accessible for decision making. An important issue is how people make use of their stored knowledge. Typically consumers start with some goal. The goal might be to quench thirst or to lose weight. Thought about this goal triggers the activation of categories that might be used to satisfy the goal. The thirst-quenching goal might prompt people to consider different beverages such as water, soft drinks, sports drinks and beer. The category that is available and that is most likely to achieve the goal is selected. Brands in the category are considered in relation to each other or in relation to the goal by retrieving brand associations including those learned through advertising. A brand that is perceived to be superior in achieving some goal is selected.

This depiction underscores the fact that much of persuasion is self-persuasion. In response to an advertising message, consumers activate their own repertoire of message relevant information and associate it with newsworthy information contained in the message. The implication of this depiction was examined in the discussion of targeting, where we noted that because much of persuasion is self-persuasion, current users are the segment that should be considered first and dropped only when a vastly superior and compelling alternative is available. The fact that advertising information is elaborated in relation to prior knowledge also calls in to question the use of verbatim recall of advertising as a measure of ad effectiveness.

Elaboration has an Optimal Level. Elaboration is a resource demanding activity. It takes significant cognitive effort to associate advertising information to prior knowledge. The availability of too little attention to this task due to competing demands on consumers’ time or a lack of interest in the topic, means an ad will prompt little consideration, or be totally ignored. Little of the ad content will be represented in memory and a message will have little persuasive power. At the same time, caution is necessary not to prompt too much elaboration. High levels of elaboration activate content that is likely to be idiosyncratic to the particular consumer rather than a close approximation of what was said in an ad. For example, one idiosyncratic thought that a person who had seen the same McDonald’s ad many times involved recalling when he worked at McDonald’s and found a fly in the burger. In other instances, the idiosyncratic thoughts may take the form of "I know what they are saying." Idiosyncratic thoughts are typically less favorable toward a brand than are the thoughts expressed in a brand message, which is designed specifically with the intent to persuade. Thus, the goal is to prompt enough elaboration so that people process the message content and associate it with their prior knowledge, but not so much that they elaborate on their own thoughts that may be only remotely related to what is conveyed in a message.

Memory as a Tool and Memory as an Object. The depiction of how consumers make judgments developed to this point presents the decision-maker as someone who uses memory to make brand judgments. Thus, memory is used in the service of retrieving information from advertising and other sources that are useful in rendering a judgment. When memory operates in this way, it acts as a tool in decision making.

There are occasions, however, when memory operates not as a tool but as an object. This occurs when people are reflective about how memory affects their decisions. Along these lines, consumers might not only consider Corona’s benefits in making a decision about whether or not to buy it, but also reflect on how difficult it was to make the decision when evaluating the brand. The more difficult it is to make the decision, the less the brand is valued ("If it was superior, a decision would have been easy"). Using an evaluation of the decision making process to judge a brand is referred to as process-based affect.

Process-Based Affect. Some recent research illustrates this process. People are shown an ad for a BMW and the copy asks, "Can you think of one good reason to buy a BMW?" It is found that this ad is more persuasive than when the same ad is shown and the copy is changed to "Can you think of 10 good reasons to buy a BMW?" In contrast, when consumers are shown reasons to buy a BMW generated by some one else, they are more persuaded by 10 reasons than by one. These outcomes suggest that it is not the content per se that is creating the affect, but respondents reflection on how effortful it is to think up one or 10 reasons. Thus this scenario illustrates process-based affect.

In some recent studies that I conducted with colleagues, we replicate the one reason more persuasive than 10 and also show that asking people for the one or 10 best reasons to buy a BMW could eliminate this outcome. Our logic was that thinking of the one best reason would be perceived to be as hard or harder than thinking of the 10 best reasons. We also found that other means of making 10 reasons seem easy to develop, such as by showing respondents many reasons to buy other products or by making it an enjoyable task (Imagine 10 reasons to buy a BMW) rather than a challenge. These conditions were successful in making ads involving the elicitation of 10 reasons as persuasive or more persuasive than when one reason was to be generated.

While the information about a brand and process-based affect influence brand evaluations, it appears that process-based affect is a secondary system. Consumers attempt to make a decision on the basis of features of brands in the choice set. When the superior choice is not apparent on the basis of this analysis, consumers resort to process-based affect. Thus, ambiguity in the choice set is one circumstance in which process-based affect guides choice. Another situation in which process-based affect is the basis for decision making is when consumers desire to truncate the decision process and use a heuristic, or shortcut, to arrive at a decision. It appears that process-based affect is less taxing than processing of content about a brand and thus is used in resource limited circumstances.

Memory as an Object: Correction. Consumers also use memory as an object to limit the liability of their brand evaluations. As an efficient decision-maker, consumers want to make assessments as accurate as possible so that they are not surprised by brand performance on later occasions of use. Suppose they decide that they like Corona when they first consume it, but this occurred in the context of meeting with a good friend. Because the consumption of Coronas in the future will not always be with this person, the decision-maker attempts to separate the liking that is attributable to the brand from that attributable to the context that does not always co-vary with brand use. In this circumstance, correction is observed if the decision-maker has sufficient resources to do so by virtue of high product involvement, enough time to process and the like. This entails removing that portion of brand liking that is attributable to the context. As an empirical matter, what is often seen is over-correction, where people are less favorable toward a brand that is consumed in a favorable context than when consumption is not so encumbered. Such correction does not occur when other events always co-vary with the brand experience.

In some situations, the information that is in memory plays a much more limited role than what we have depicted in describing the conceptual route to persuasion. In these circumstances people might not elaborate on advertising information. Nevertheless, advertising information is processed in a perceptual manner and this knowledge can affect the decisions made.

Consider advertising that presents a brand name or perhaps a brand name and a slogan. This type of information abounds in the form of billboards, signage at sporting events, product placements and the like. What impact does this information have? Typically, people exhibit poor learning of such advertising when learning is measured by prompts such as "Can you remember seeing an ad for beer?" or "Can you remember seeing an ad for Corona beer?" Yet when consumers who have seen such advertising are asked to indicate their brand choice, they are more likely to select an advertised brand than if they had not been exposed to advertising. We refer to this memory as perceptual memory. Like memory that is based on elaboration of incoming information, perceptual memory can stimulate persuasion.

If elaboration does not enhance perceptual memory, what does? One important factor is repeated instantiation of the information. Along these lines, the repeated presentation of a brand name or a brand name and a slogan makes them seem familiar. In turn, this familiarity increases the likelihood of the brand’s selection in circumstances where choice is stimulus based. For example, this would be the case in a supermarket where the choice of a beverage is made by searching for a brand while standing in front of the category display.

To illustrate the process, consider the purchase of a brand of soft drink. Prior to visiting the store you have seen repeatedly the logo for Coke. This has occurred through media advertising, signage at sporting events and product placements in movies. When making a choice at the store, the Coke brand appears more familiar and this familiarity helps to reduce feelings of uncertainty and to prompt the selection of Coke. While this preference might be overcome if consumers elaborate on the benefits of a brand other than Coke, the sheer number of decisions to be made in the market place limits the extent to which consumers are willing to engage in such elaborative, conceptual processing.