It's All About the Approach

SOURCE: heyrachy.weebly.com/blog/category/advertising

How do companies advertise their products or services in such a way that consumers decide to make a purchase? Advertising messages are intended to persuade a target audience to buy a product or service, but other goals include increasing brand awareness and creating favorable attitudes toward a product or its maker.

In an Adage article by Curt Hanke, the co-founder of Shine advertising agency, he says 95% of the thinking the human brain does is unconscious. Since so much of a person's thoughts are made unconsciously, advertising has a tremendous opportunity to influence consumers' thoughts and wants for a product without them even knowing it.

Persuasion techniques can be either rational, irrational or a combination of both.

Rational appeal is an art of persuasion that seeks to convince the audience about something entirely through the use of logical reasoning. When making a claim, a speaker using rational appeal would use factual and logical statements to back up the claim and clearly lead to the conclusion given. Irrational advertising is when a company claims or shows that a product will do something for consumers that it will not actually do. Errin Miller, who works for a branding and advertising agency, wrote her article "Rational vs. Irrational Advertising" and used a shoe to compare the two. It would be rational to advertise that a shoe has good support for running, but it would be irrational to say the shoe will make consumers go to the gym more often.

Research from the Adage article shows that 66% of a person's decision to buy a product from a certain brand is done so with emotions. Whether the approach is rational or irrational, advertising agencies are trying to unconsciously get consumers to emotionally want their product.

One example of this is the advertising for the Skechers Shape Up shoe. Skechers used irrational advertising to sell thousands of shoes, convincing people the shoes would tone their legs and behind without any workout beyond their daily walking. The company even made claims about the shoes helping people lose weight. Fortunately the Federal Trade Commission fined Skechers $40 million and stopped them from selling the bogus shoes. This kind of irrational advertising occurs often but isn't caught and fined by the FTC. Although it may be wrong to make claims with no actual proof behind them, companies are making huge profits daily from it.

In my opinion the real question is whether or not it should be up to the government to find bogus claims and products or should consumers be able to see through that themselves.
Another example of this is hand sanitizer. Hand sanitizer does not kill as many germs or some of the diseases it says it can, but it is still doing users a favor. The two examples are different though because one claim is industry wide and the other is one companies claim. Skechers is taking sales and money from customers that would spend it on other shoes and products which takes away money from other companies. If all hand sanitizers are claiming the same thing, they aren't unfairly taking sales away from other companies.

Future Research Question: How is the placement and frequency of an advertisement affect consumers decision to buy products?