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Michael Budd Professor Kendra Andrews English 1102 12/12/12 Influencing Consumer Behavior Using Classical Conditioning, Frequency, Rhetoric, and Target Audience in Advertising The United States is a nation that has been very prosperous over the course of time. The information age is here. Advertising is a market practice that has evolved within the information age, and it is common to see it in a normal day for most Americans. There are advertisements on television, billboards, internet websites, and now they are even on smart phones. Advertisements can inform, entertain, and persuade the audience of the advertisement. There are advertisements for thoughts and beliefs, information, products, elections, and events. Advertisements are a way of promoting a product, belief, or idea on the surface, however; there is a lot that goes on in the planning and creation of advertisements. Advertisers use many different techniques that stimulate and condition the brain. Colors are used to evoke emotions, words are used to create catchy and memorable slogans, graphics are used to appeal to the eye, and the language used is appropriate for the advertisements target audience. Advertising attempts to influence the choices consumers make by using classical conditioning techniques to try to exploit the brains cognitive processes, increasing the frequency of advertising, using rhetoric in the advertising, and targeting the right audience.

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The advertising industry can trace its roots to the early eighteenth century in Europe. Advertisers could only advertise on a local level during that time. Signs advertising products and service would be held up for people passing through a town to read. Newspaper advertisements were also used during that time. The advertisements in newspapers were only text descriptions of goods or services. Advertising started to grow as the industrial revolution hit America. Paper was cheaper, which led to more advertising in newspapers. Advertisements could have pictures along with the text in newspapers. Advertising grew as the technology advanced. Mass production of goods led to mass advertising of the goods. Advertisements developed for every invention of mass media. The mass production and mass advertising of products pushed American society towards an attitude of consumerism (Stearns). Classical conditioning is a form of associative learning that involves matching a stimulus that naturally elicits a response with one that does not until the second stimulus has the same result as the first stimulus. Ivan P. Pavlov, a Russian physiologist, developed the framework for studying classical conditioning. He conducted an experiment where a dog was given dry meat powder while a tone was being sounded. First only the meat powder made the dog salivate, but after repeat trials the tone alone could make the dog salivate. The meat powder was considered an unconditional stimulus, because it made the dog salivate naturally. The salivation caused by the meat powder was considered an unconditional response as it did not require any training or conditioning. The tone was the conditional stimulus. It was called the conditional stimulus, because it could not elicit the salivation until it had been conditioned to do so through repeated trials of pairing it with the unconditional stimulus. The salivation caused by the bell tone alone was known as the conditional response (Doorey 1003-1004). This same procedure is used in advertising. Music, words, voices, graphics, and other things that evoke emotions are used as an

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unconditional stimulus to be paired with the brand or product being advertised. The unconditional response is the emotion elicited by the unconditional stimulus, and the conditioned response is the same exact emotion being elicited by the conditional stimulus. One study examined the use of classical conditioning within advertising, and found many advertisements use classical conditioning: A cursory glance at current advertising supports Nord and Peters point. The products of fast food chains are often marketed by associating their names with the sight and sound of a sizzling hamburger, soft drinks are associated with catchy jingles, breakfast cereals are associated with famous sports personalities, and so on. Supermarkets play music for their customers while they shop (Milliman 1982). All of this is done in the hope of altering consumer behavior (McSweeney and Bierley 619). This observation shows that advertisers are indeed using classical conditioning to take advantage of how the brain associates products or services with certain stimuli. The response that is conditioned is normally a positive emotion that is then associated with the product or brand. This process is used to try to persuade the consumer to purchase a product, because of the positive association with the product created by conditioning. Classical conditioning is not the only factor that is used to influence a consumers choice. A study published in the Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice implies: Classical conditioning principles predict that in many circumstances, affective responses, usually positive, elicited by an advertisement will eventually transfer to the advertised brand over one or more exposures to the ad. (Smith, Feinberg, and Burns 63)

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The repeated exposure expressed by the study is where an advertisements frequency comes into play. This is another component of how advertisements influence their audience. The frequency of an advertisement can be described as the number of times a viewer will see that advertisement over a given period of time. This is very important to advertisers, as it helps the audience remember the advertisement better. Another important factor is the downtime a person must have before seeing the advertisement again. One recent study stated: It is well known that repetition of advertising is an effective learning tool. Laboratory and field evidence shows that memory for repeated material improves as the time between presentations of advertising material increases, especially when there is a delay between the second presentation of the stimulus and the memory test. (Janiszewski, Noel, Sawyer 147) This strategy can be seen on any television in America right now. There are at least two or three commercial breaks during any television program. Often times the same commercial can be seen twice during a program. The frequency and spacing helps viewers to learn and remember information seen in advertisements while being stimulated by watching television. A television is one of the most common items found in the modern American household, which means this affects a large amount of people. The study was published in the Journal of Consumer Research signifying its important amongst advertisers and other people with marketing occupations. The more a consumer can remember an advertisement the more likely they are to purchase the product. The frequency combined with classical conditioning techniques influences consumers toward liking the advertised product over another product. Frequency is only one strategy of

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conditioning used within advertisements, but material for the content audience is another key component. Rhetorical strategies like schemes and tropes are often found in any type of advertisements. Advertisements use repetition, rhythm, rhyming, and other rhetorical strategies to come up with catchy slogans the viewers will often remember. Edward McQuarrie and David Mick expressed in their study that: Thus, more complex figures, whether scheme or trope, should be more difficult to comprehend than their simpler counterparts. However, it is also the case that effortfully processed information is more readily retrieved from memory than less effortfully processed information (Greenwald and Leavitt 1984). (McQuarrie and Mick 433) These results imply that using rhetorical figures does in fact help consumers remember information from an advertisement .The use of figurative language increases the amount of thinking necessary to process the meaning. The extra effort required to process the information is what causes information learned in an advertisement to be more memorable. There are two other important functions of rhetoric that were detailed in the same study. Figurative language used in advertising has the effect of attracting and keeping attention. This is very important for ads in print sources like magazines and newspapers, or for ads on the internet or mobile phones. A consumer has the option to skip over these advertisements, but when rhetoric is used the advertisement attracts more of the readers attention. This inclines the reader to finish reading the advertisement. Figurative language can also produce positive attitudes toward an advertisement. Processing clever word arrangements and other uses of rhetoric can produce arousal and pleasure. The audience of the advertisement feels satisfied after figuring out the meaning of the

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figurative language used within the advertisement (McQuarrie and Mick 427). The positive attitude toward the advertisement will transfer to the product or brand itself through use of rhetoric as a unconditional stimulus in classical conditioning. The hope is that the positive attitude toward the product will influence consumers to choose that product over others, and the use of rhetoric will aid the consumer in remembering information about the product. Rhetoric is an effective tool for altering a consumers behavior. Another method used in advertising is targeting the right audience. The target audience is something that every advertising campaign has to consider when trying to develop the advertisements. The content and language used must be something the viewer likes. This will make the product appeal more to that consumer. A study conducted in 2005 came up with a few very interesting and important conclusions about the benefits of targeting the right audience. One result is that making advertisements specific for a target audience will reduce the competition that would otherwise be created by advertising to consumers who only buy through comparison of prices. Another conclusion the study reached was that advertising directed at a target audience will eliminate advertising that would have been otherwise wasted on consumers who prefer the competitions product. The study also found that by advertising towards a target audience, companies can save money. The money used in advertising that would have been wasted on someone who is less inclined to buy could be used for another advertisement towards the target audience (Iyer, Soberman, and Villas-Boas 473). The results in the study imply that advertisers have multiple incentives to have a target audience for an advertising campaign. Another incentive of having a target audience is increasing the products presence against a competitors product in the same audience. This presence combined with classical condition, and other techniques is meant to push a consumer to purchase the

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product advertised. The advertisement is also tapping into the consumers preference. This means that conditioning of some form has taken place, and conditional response has been developed for the product or brand. The conditional response is normally a positive feeling or emotion. The positive emotion is used to promote the need for a consumer purchasing a product advertised. This is how advertisers try to use the marketing strategy of a target audience to their advantage. The evidence supports that there is a multitude of thinking behind advertisements or advertising campaigns. Advertisers are using classical conditioning techniques, rhetoric, and a target audience in order to influence consumer behavior and attitude to be positive towards the product. Information in advertisements is remembered more through using rhetoric, and attention is grabbed as well. Classical conditioning leads to the association of positive feelings with a product, and using a target audience ensures these advertisements reach the right people. People that see advertisements should be aware of this information. They should know that advertisers know how the brain learns and remembers information, and they intend to use it to their advantage for profit.

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Works Cited Doorey, Marie. Conditioning. The Gale Encyclopedia of Science. Ed. K. Lee Lerner and Brenda Wilmoth Lerner. 3rd Ed. Vol 2.: 1003-1006. Gale Virtual Reference Library Print. Iyer Ganesh, David Soberman, and J. Miguel Villas-Boas. The Targeting of Advertising. Marketing Science 24.3 (2005): 461-476. Print. JSTOR Janiszweski Chris, Haydeon Noel, and Alan G. Sawyer. A Meta-analysis of the Spacing Effect in Verbal Learning: Implications for Research on Advertising Repetition and Consumer Memory. Journal of Consumer Research 30.1 (2003): 138-149. Print. JSTOR McQuarrie, Edward F. and David Glen Mick. Figures of Rhetoric in Advertising Language. Journal of Consumer Research 22.4 (1996): 424-438. Print. JSTOR McSweeney, Frances K. and Calvin Bierley. Recent Developments in Classical Conditioning. Journal of Consumer Research 11.2 (1984): 619-631. Print. JSTOR Smith, Peter W., Richard A. Feinberg, and David J. Burns. An Examination of Classical Conditioning Principles in an Ecologically Valid Advertising Context. Journal of Consumer Research 6.1 (1998): 63-72. Print. JSTOR Stearns, Peter N. Advertising. Oxford Reference. Oxford University Press. . n.d. Web. 19 Nov.2012.