Now listen to part of a lecture in a Psychology class. The professor is discussing advertising strategies.
Professor (female): In advertising various strategies are used to persuade people to buy products. In order to sell more products, advertisers will often try to make us believe that a product will meet our needs or desires perfectly, even if it’s not true. The strategies that they use can be subtle, friendly forms of persuasion that are sometimes hard to recognize.
In a lot of ads, repetition is a key strategy. Research shows that repeated exposure to a message, even something meaningless or untrue, is enough to make people accept it or see it in a positive light. You’ve all seen the car commercials on TV like, uh, the one that refers to its roomy cars over and over again. You know which one I mean. This guy is driving around and keeps stopping to pick up different people. He picks up three or four people. And each time, the narrator says, “Plenty of room for friends, plenty of room for family, plenty of room for everybody.” The same message is repeated several times in the course of the commercial. Now the car, the car actually looks kind of small, it’s not a big car at all, but you get the sense that it’s pretty spacious. You’d think the viewer would reach the logical conclusion that the slogan miss-represents the product, instead, what usually happens is that when the statement “plenty of room” is repeated often enough, people are actually convinced it’s true.
Um, another strategy they use is to get a celebrity to advertise a product. It turns out that we’re more likely to accept an advertisement claim made by somebody famous, a person we admire and find appealing. We tend to think they’re trustworthy. So, uh, you might have a car commercial that features a well-known race car driver. Now, it may not be a very fast car, uh, it could even be an inexpensive vehicle with a low performance rating. But if a popular race car driver is shown driving it and saying, “I like my cars fast!” Then people would believe the car is impressive with its speed.
Using the examples from the talk, explain how persuasive strategies are used in advertising.
The professor talks about two kinds of persuasive strategies in advertising. The first strategy is repetition. When a slogan is repeated enough times, we tend to believe what the slogan says. The example is a car commercial. A guy is driving around and keeps stopping to pick up different people, each time a narrative says “Plenty of room for friends”, “Plenty of room for family” and so on. If we hear the slogan so many times, we tend to believe the car is spacious even if it’s not. The second strategy is using celebrities. We believe celebrities are trustworthy. For example, in a car commercial, If a famous race-car driver is shown in a car and says “I like my car fast.”, people will believe the car is fast even if it’s actually not a very fast car.
