I do my best to avoid advertising. I don’t have cable TV. I listen to public radio. But, I can’t avoid it completely. I was reminded of that recently when I went
to see one of the big summer blockbusters at a local theater. I had to get to the theater early to avoid
sitting right up front, but that meant I had to endure 20 minutes of
advertising that the theater used to keep me “entertained” while I waited for
the start of the show.
As I sat in the theater, I looked at the diverse
audience. There were young kids there
with parents. There were packs of
teens. There were grandparents taking
grandchildren. There was also a racial
and ethnic mix in the crowd. So, how can
the same ad reach all of these people?
On the one hand, it is clear that a big part of advertising
is just exposing people to a product or brand.
Research on mere exposure
going back to the 1960s shows that people like things better when they have
seen them before than when they are new.
I have written about the effects of mere exposure in other blog
entries.
But, what about the content of the message in an ad? Even if the product is one that would appeal
to most people in the crowd, do people respond differently to different kinds
of messages?
As luck would have it, I didn’t have to wait long for an
answer. There is a nice paper in the
June, 2012 issue of Psychological Science
by Jacob Hirsh, Sonia Kang, and Galen Bodenhausen that looked at the
effectiveness of different advertising messages based on people’s personality
traits.
Personality psychologists have identified the “Big
Five.” These traits (extraversion,
agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness, and neuroticism) are the broad ways
that people differ from each other. For
example, extraverts tend to like excitement and to be the center of attention
in group situations, while introverts do not.
People who are highly agreeable tent to like to please others.
The researchers developed five versions of an ad for a new
phone. Buried in the ad were sentences
that were aimed at people with a particular personality trait. For example, for the extraverts, the ad said
that the phone was designed for “strong, active, outgoing people like
you…you’ll always be where the excitement is…[this phone] will keep you in the
spotlight.”
The ad designed for highly agreeable people had sentences
like “You’ll have access to your loved ones like never before…designed with
empathy and consideration…get in touch with your caring side.”
The study was run using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which is a
site where people can do simple tasks and get paid. Researchers are increasingly using Mechanical
Turk to collect data, because it allows them to go beyond the population of
college students that are normally used in research studies.
Research participants saw one version of the ad and rated
how effective they thought it was. Then,
they filled out a brief questionnaire that assessed their personality along the
Big Five dimensions.
The data showed that ads were rated as more effective when
the message resonated with an aspect of a person’s personality. That is, people with high levels of
extraversion responded favorably to the ad that was written for extraverts,
while people with low levels of extraversion responded negative to that
ad. Obviously, people have many
different aspects to their personality, so the same person might respond
favorably to many different ads if they were all tailored to their personality
characteristics.
This study demonstrates a weakness of the typical approach
to advertising that blankets people with messages. Any given ad is going to appeal most strongly
to people with particular personality characteristics. The same ad may be quite effective for people
high in a particular characteristic and rather ineffective for people low in
that same characteristic.
I suppose that is where social media like Facebook come
in. Presumably, people’s patterns of
usage of social media provide information about their personality. This information could be used by advertisers
to present messages that are specific to their traits in ways that would
maximize the appeal of those messages.
Of course, if you don’t want to be influenced by ads, just
shut off the TV and take a walk.
