تاثیرات مثبت تبلیغات مخرب بر ترجیحات مصرف کنندگان
Abstract
1- Introduction
2- Experiment 1
3- Experiment 2
4- Experiment 3
5- Experiment 4
6- Experiment 5
General Discussion
References
Abstract
Advertisers want to get consumers to love the advertised products, but they often try to do this by annoying them with unwelcome and disruptive advertising. This creates a possible contradiction between the negative feelings elicited by the advertising and the positive feelings the consumers are supposed to develop towards the advertised products. One may assume that the negative feelings towards annoying advertising are transferred to the advertised brands. This assumption was tested in a series of five experiments. Participants were disrupted by annoying pop-up ads while playing a popular computer game. In a two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) test, participants were required to choose between advertised and new brands. The advertised brands were preferred over the new brands, even though the ads were perceived as annoying. The positive effects of disruptive advertising can be attributed to the enhanced fluency of advertised brands. These findings demonstrate that disruptive advertising can be effective in increasing brand preferences, which may help to explain the widespread use of this type of advertising in practice. However, before recommending the use of disruptive advertising, it should be taken into consideration that it may also have undesirable side effects such as increasing advertising avoidance.
Introduction
Advertisers want to get consumers to love products, but they often try to do this by annoying them with unwelcome and disruptive advertising. This creates a possible contradiction between the negative feelings elicited by the advertising and the positive feelings the consumers are supposed to develop towards the advertised products. To illustrate, we asked 24 students in a course on Consumer Psychology to rate the degree to which they perceived the ads they encounter every day as annoying. Nearly half of the students (45%) reported that they found ads “almost always” annoying, and half of the students (50%) reported that they found ads “sometimes” annoying. Upon inquiry, the one person who stated that she was “almost never” annoyed by ads admitted that she had installed an ad blocker on her computer, and that she did not watch television at all, which suggests that she was probably just very good at avoiding ads altogether. This is of course only anecdotal evidence, but the negative view of advertising is also reflected in large-scale surveys on this issue (Cho and Cheon 2004; Edwards, Li, and Lee 2002). Ads can be annoying in a number of ways—they can have shocking and offensive content or can be presented in an annoying way. In the present study, we are interested in disruptive advertising (e.g., pop-up ads) that distract from important or pleasant activities, or may even disrupt these activities entirely. Perceived interference with task-related goals was found to be the most important factor in explaining negative attitudes towards Internet ads (Cho and Cheon 2004). Pop-up ads that directly interfere with ongoing tasks are known to be perceived as particularly annoying (Edwards, Li, and Lee 2002). However, while it is clear that intrusive pop-up ads are perceived as annoying, it is unclear whether this annoyance is transferred to the advertised brands. If so, this would defeat the purpose of advertising because it would hurt the advertised brands. However, the fact that disruptive advertising is so widely used in practice may suggest that the assumption that annoyance is transferred to the advertised brands is false, and that, quite to the contrary, disruptive advertising has positive effects on consumer preferences.