How do brand advertisements stimulate purchasing impulse?

In this article, I will talk about the impact of advertising on consumers’ quick thinking.

First, I will use the Apple mobile phone as an example to talk about the process of consumers being influenced by advertisements.

Xiao Ming drives home on the highway after get off work every day. Since September, he has seen an Apple mobile phone billboard every day on his way home. When he first saw it, he was not an Apple fan and did not have much impression of Apple phones, but just thought the phone was very beautiful.

But seeing the ad every day on his way home from get off work made him more and more impressed with Apple's mobile phone.

One day when he was taking the elevator upstairs, he found that the elevator advertisement had also been replaced with Apple’s latest products; when he was browsing his circle of friends after dinner, he saw Apple’s advertisement again.

He may not know that this is an omni-channel advertising campaign carried out by Apple after it launches new products at a press conference, with the aim of covering and influencing consumers like him on the largest scale and with the highest frequency.

After multiple rounds of advertising exposure, Xiao Ming has a better understanding of Apple phones; but because he has no plans to change his phone this month, his understanding of Apple phones still remains at the level of advertising impressions.

The annual e-commerce promotion event, Double 11, is coming soon, and Xiao Ming wants to take advantage of Double 11 to buy a new mobile phone. The previous multi-channel Apple advertisements have made Xiao Ming familiar with Apple phones. He knows that Apple phones are one of the best phones on the market, and the first time he saw an Apple advertisement, he was deeply impressed by the beautiful appearance of the product. However, he has not made up his mind to spend more than 6,000 to buy a mobile phone. His psychological budget for mobile phones may be only four or five thousand.

On Double 11, Xiao Ming was browsing on Taobao when he suddenly discovered that the latest Apple mobile phone was reduced by 500 yuan in the day's promotion, so the selling price was only a little over 6,000 yuan, which was only 1,000 yuan more than his psychological budget. More importantly, the promotion also supported interest-free installments. Xiao Ming calculated that it would only cost less than 300 yuan a month to get the latest Apple mobile phone. So he decisively "chopped off his hands".

It took Xiao Ming more than two months from the first time he saw an Apple mobile phone advertisement to the time he placed an order. During these two months, Apple's advertisements in various channels have always played a role in Xiao Ming's final consumption decision.

There has been a lot of research in the industry about the ways in which advertising promotes consumption. Both AISAS (attention, interest, desire, memory, action) and AIPL (cognition, interest, purchase, loyalty) are correct models.

But what I want to talk about here is the role of fast thinking in consumers' decision-making process, which is not currently taken seriously in the field of advertising and marketing.

01 The role of fast thinking in advertising

First, let’s review fast thinking and its role.

Daniel Kahneman further divides human thinking into two systems in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow:

• System 1 operates unconsciously and quickly, does not require much brainpower, does not involve any feelings, and is completely under autonomous control. It can be called fast thinking.
• System 2 shifts attention to brain activities that require mental effort, such as complex calculations, which can be called slow thinking.

The role of advertising is to use people's quick thinking to encourage consumers to make decisions that are beneficial to their own brands.

Let’s review Xiao Ming’s consumption decision path:

For the first time, the advertisement of Apple mobile phone established the impression of "beautiful" appearance in Xiao Ming's mind. Subsequently, Apple advertisements reached Xiao Ming through all channels, making Xiao Ming more and more familiar with Apple mobile phones, and Apple mobile phones stayed in his mind longer and longer. On the day of Double 11, the promotional advertisement of 500 yuan off and the tool for analyzing interest-free (24 installments with no interest, which is equivalent to no money when rounded off) helped Xiao Ming "buy".

When Xiao Ming actually uses an Apple phone, he is likely to enter Apple's brand community, communicate with similar people, and unconsciously regard himself as a believer in Apple phones, the so-called Apple fan, and establish strong brand loyalty.

Quick thinking played a role in Xiao Ming's four-stage decision-making path.

Through the exposure of the advertisement, Xiao Ming’s quick thinking helped him to establish a perceptual perception that Apple has a “beautiful appearance”.

High-frequency advertising exposure has strengthened Xiao Ming’s brain’s familiarity with Apple.

Promotional advertisements + financial tools make Xiao Ming, who has quick thinking, feel that things are cheap, so he “buys”.

Eventually, Xiao Ming became an Apple fan and established his own identity.

The seeds planted by the Apple advertisements in Xiao Ming's brain a few months ago have borne fruit, and the impact of these advertisements on Xiao Ming's brain is almost imperceptible. Xiao Ming has unknowingly turned from a stranger to the Apple brand into an Apple fan.

02 How can brands take advantage of people’s quick thinking at each stage of consumer decision-making?

Intuitive thinking plays a role in the consumer decision-making path. This is very representative in Xiao Ming’s example. I will analyze them one by one according to the four stages divided into above.

1. The first stage: Advertising establishes perceptual cognition

In today’s advertising, most brands are increasingly appealing to emotion.

Which of the following two ways of thinking when buying a laptop do you follow?

A: I want a laptop with a rating of 4.8 or above on Jifeng.com, an Intel 10-core processor, a graphics card model MX450, 4G RAM, and a 250G solid-state drive.

B: I want that pink slim notebook.

Most girls may be attracted by the pink thin and light notebook and not pay much attention to its configuration.

In fact, most laptop advertisements will highlight the laptop's appearance, color, thinness, fashion and other elements. It is rare for a laptop to describe its configuration in great detail in an outdoor advertisement.

Pringle and Field did a study:

They compared the difference in profit growth created by communication activities that took the emotional route and the rational route, and found that the average growth created by the emotional route was 31%, which was almost double the 16% of the rational route. If the communication method was a combination of the emotional route and the rational route, the profit growth was 26%.

The scholars who conducted this study summarized two reasons why emotional advertising can bring higher profit growth.

• The human brain can receive emotional information without cognitive processing.
• Our brains are particularly susceptible to strong emotional stimulation and are better at "recording" such stimulation and leaving memories.

Ultimately, emotional information affects people's quick thinking, and quick thinking has a greater impact on consumers' decisions.

A beer ad shows a guy sitting on the beach drinking beer with a beautiful woman snuggling up to him; eventually, the beer is paired with an unconditioned stimulus (the beautiful woman), and the beer itself becomes the conditioned stimulus - the audience will then run to buy the conditioned stimulus (the beer) because it is strongly associated with the unconditioned stimulus (the beautiful woman).

The association between beer and beautiful women is also to establish the intuitive feeling in consumers’ quick thinking that this brand of beer = attracting beautiful women.

Positioning theory is largely about using people's quick thinking to associate products with a sensory characteristic and establish a mindset in consumers' minds.

For example, Yuanqi Forest, which has been very popular in recent years, directly associates its products with sugar-free and health, and the words 0 sugar, 0 fat, and 0 calories are very obvious on its packaging.

The connection between Yuanqi Forest and sugar-free directly occupied the consumers' quick thinking, so that many people mistakenly believed that drinking Yuanqi Forest can help them lose weight (by the way, I’ll tell you a secret to lose weight: eat less and exercise more, it has nothing to do with whether you drink Yuanqi Forest or not).

2. The second stage: advertising strengthens impression and increases brand familiarity

The more familiar a person is with another person, the more likely he or she is to like that person. The degree of familiarity can change a person's view of another person, just like what New Pants sang in the song "Life is Hot Because of You": The girl in the plaid room will also be beautiful after a long time.

The same goes for brands. When a consumer decides to buy a product, most of the time it is based on his or her familiarity with the product. The more familiar the consumer is with the brand, the more likely he or she is to make a purchase.

Psychologist Zajonc once conducted an experiment in which he asked subjects who did not know Chinese to learn Chinese characters. Some subjects looked at the characters 5 times, some 10 times, and some 25 times. At the end of the experiment, the subjects had to guess whether these characters were positive or negative. The subjects did not understand Chinese, so the Chinese characters had no meaning to them, but they all agreed that most of the Chinese characters they saw were positive, and the more times the subjects saw them, the better they felt about the characters. Zajonc found through repeated studies that the more frequently people come into contact with something, the more they consider it to be positive - this is the exposure effect in psychology.

If most brands want to become more familiar to consumers, the easiest way is to advertise more.

Many brands like to advertise heavily on Focus Media’s elevator ads. The rationale behind this is to allow every person who takes the elevator to see their ads multiple times a day, thereby increasing their familiarity with the brand.

Let’s take Genki Forest as an example again. Its large number of advertisements in elevators not only enhances consumers’ familiarity with the brand, but its characteristics of 0 sugar, 0 fat, and 0 calories also enhance consumers’ favorability towards the brand.

There is a question on Zhihu: Since Coca-Cola is so famous, is it possible not to advertise? Of course not. If you don’t advertise for too long, consumers will become less familiar with the brand, the exposure effect will become weaker and weaker, and ultimately sales will be affected.

Of course, the more advertising, the better it is not. There needs to be a certain degree of advertising, and there needs to be a certain amount of variation - overexposure will lead to advertising fatigue.

As shown in the two-factor theory of information repetition in the figure below, as the number of exposures increases, the positive impact on consumers continues to expand; but when it exceeds a certain number, the negative impact will expand rapidly, ultimately making the net effect worse.

(Consumer Behavior, 12th Edition)

Therefore, most brands will change their advertisements to new ones after a period of time, or reduce the length of advertisements; after all, watching too many advertisements like "Platinum Travel Photography" will indeed bring negative effects.

3. The third stage: multi-channel advertising promotion action

Generally speaking, traditional advertising is unlikely to directly promote consumers to make instant purchases. As mentioned above, its role is to gradually market consumers' quick thinking.

But today, advertising comes in a variety of forms. New forms of advertising, such as offline store promotional advertising, information flow advertising, and e-commerce advertising, can quickly encourage consumers to place orders.

The most effective promotional advertisements in offline stores are those such as "half price for the second item" and "300 off for purchases over 1,000", which often make people lose their minds.

Once when I went to a convenience store to buy Weiquan, I saw an advertisement that one bottle was 7.5 yuan and two bottles were 11 yuan; the rational choice was that I would only drink one bottle because it just met my needs; but my quick thinking told me that buying one bottle was not cost-effective, and buying a second bottle would be the equivalent of 3.5 yuan, so I finally chose to buy two bottles.

But in fact, buying two bottles is a waste, because one bottle can meet the demand, and the second bottle is often not finished and has to be forced to be drunk, which is not only unhealthy, but also a waste of 3.5 yuan; when I faced the temptation of two cheaper bottles, I had already lost my rational thinking: my real need at the moment is one bottle is enough.

This takes advantage of the psychological concept of loss aversion. Signs like "Don't miss out", "Only two left", "Limited quantity, hurry up if you want to buy", "Second item half price" etc. will make you feel that you will lose out if you don't buy it.

At the beginning of the article, Xiao Ming spent more than 6,000 yuan to buy an Apple phone. What prompted him to make the final move was loss aversion, because it was more than 500 yuan cheaper and there was 24 interest-free installments. If he did not buy it under this circumstance, it would be a loss for him. This quick thinking prompted him to "decisively buy it."

Although promotional advertising is useful, the prerequisite is that the first two steps of brand advertising have established an impression in the minds of consumers and deepened this impression. Without these two steps, promotional advertising alone is useless.

4. Stage 4: Building Brand Loyalty

Every brand hopes that consumers will be loyal to it so that its business can be sustainable.

When consumers make consumption decisions, they must choose one and give up another; when they choose product A, they will generally rationalize their choice, especially when their choice does not seem so wise, they will think that their choice of product A is better than product B in all aspects.

This is post-decision dissonance.

For example, if you decide that you like someone, but a certain behavior or characteristic of this person makes you uncomfortable, in order to maintain your view that you like this person, you will find reasons for this behavior or characteristic of this person so that you can continue to like him.

The same goes for brands.

Smart brands will strengthen the rationality of consumers' choices, such as providing strategies that are more advantageous than competing products, providing better after-sales consulting services, inviting them to join brand communities, etc.

For example, a person who hesitates between NIO and fuel vehicles and finally buys NIO may experience post-decision disorder. At this time, NIO will tell consumers that it provides a longer 24-hour battery replacement service.

At this time, his psychological activities may be like this: Although NIO has range anxiety compared to fuel vehicles, the 24-hour battery replacement service solves this problem to a certain extent, and this car has more advantages in acceleration and sense of technology, so my choice is correct.

If this point is reinforced in advertising, users will have no worries about their consumption decisions.

Some brands are committed to building brand loyalty from the early stages of their relationship with consumers. Most of IKEA's furniture needs to be assembled by consumers themselves. Compared with ready-made furniture, consumers are more loyal to assembled IKEA furniture. This is the IKEA effect.

The IKEA effect refers to the fact that when consumers are highly involved in a product, they are more likely to develop brand loyalty.

Generally speaking, this is about strengthening consumers' sense of involvement in the brand. The higher the consumer's involvement in the brand, the higher their loyalty will be. Many brands will allow consumers to join their own brand communities and establish long-term connections with consumers.

Therefore, many advertisements are not about selling products, but about calling on consumers to participate in their own brand activities. The more consumers participate in brand activities, the more likely they are to consume.

03 Conclusion: The effect of advertising is subtle

The role of brand advertising is not just as simple as promotion. It also uses the quick thinking of psychology to have a subtle influence on consumers at all stages of decision-making. The role of most brand advertising is to plant seeds in the consumers' brains unconsciously, and they will bear fruit one day.

This influence is often subtle.

Author: Xunkong

Source: Xunkong’s Marketing Revelation (ID: xunkong2005)