Ágnes Buvár
Phd Student at Corvinus University of Budapest, Social Communication Doc-toral School buvaragnes@yahoo.fr
Abstract
Marketing communications has changed significantly due to digitalization and the web 2.0. Now, consumers are more conscious, active in the communication process and they also have signifi-cant knowledge about marketing and advertising that affects their behavior. Our hypothesis is that consumer empowerment and marketing literacy should affect consumers’ beliefs on advertising, marketing and on company-consumer communication.
In our exploratory research we asked 120 university students to draw their association network related to advertising, marketing and company-consumer communication. The ranking of most frequent and most important associations were analyzed.
Economy and business related associations show the growing marketing literacy of the target group; the missing negative emotional associations suggest that they accept the place and role of advertising in the modern economy. The importance of creativity indicates that the primary role of marketing activity and advertising is amusement. No association was found to support con-sumer empowerment and “internet” associated to “company-concon-sumer communication” was the only association linked to digitalization.
keywords: advertising, marketing, social representation, consumer research
Introduction
In the past few years, marketing communications have gone through a lot of im-portant changes mainly due to digitalization and the appearance of web 2.0. Con-sumers become more and more conscious and some of them are no longer passive subjects of the one-to-many communication via mass media, but they rather wish to engage and participate actively in the communication process. Consumers are not only available 24/7, but now they own tools such as social media where they can easily share experiences or express their opinion. (Csordás & Nyírő, 2013).
Consumer empowerment means more than mere consumer feedbacks, it com-prises user-generated, user-edited and user-distributed contents as well.
So the postmodern marketing era brought us the postmodern consumer who actively participates in the production of meaning, of marketing, and of sumption. The stimulus-response marketing knows less and less success as
con-sumers know they are stimulated and they develop a resistance against these stimuli (Mitchell, 2001 p. 60).
Changing environment, changing advertising
As a response to the changing environment, marketers and advertising agencies have created interactive advertising such as Burger King’s Subservient Chicken where users could give direct commands to a man dressed in a chicken suit (Jen-kins et al. 2013, p. 209) or the Hungarian Gifszínház (http://www.gifszinhaz.hu/) where the comedians of a Hungarian theater acted out situations and emotions that users asked for. Users were also encouraged to send out these little gif ani-mations that express their feelings.
This kind of advertising hardly enters to the classical definition of advertis-ing that is any paid form of non-personal communication about an organization, product, service or idea by an identified sponsor (Belch & Belch, 2001), because it definitively has an engaging personal side. According to Brown (Brown, 2006), contemporary advertising is something that hardly talks about the product. It’s subtle, allusive, indirect, clever, often self-referential or cross-referential and it presupposes a highly sophisticated, advertising and marketing literate audience.
Changing advertising, changing consumer beliefs?
As we can see both academics and professionals have reacted to these impor-tant changes in marketing communications. Our hypothesis is that such a major transformation should affect consumers’ beliefs on advertising, marketing and on company-consumer communication in general as well. On one side, due to the web 2.0 and social media, we would assume that consumers feel more empow-ered and in control in the company-consumer communication and they don’t see it as an exclusively one-way communication. On the other side, due to the grow-ing marketgrow-ing literacy, we would also assume that consumers see advertisgrow-ing as influential and manipulative, but also emotional and fun to watch.
Past researches
The classical 7-factor model of Pollay & Mittal aimed to explain how consumer beliefs about advertising influence the overall attitude about advertising in gen-eral (Pollay,& Mittal, 1993). The model was composed of three personal utility attitudes: product information, social image information and hedonic amusement and four socioeconomic factors: good for economy, fostering materialism, cor-rupting values and falsity/no-sense. Product information concerns the role of ad-vertising as provider of information. Social image information refers to brand image and personality and ideal consumer portrayal that other consumers can
relate to or identify with. Hedonic amusement emphasizes the funny and en-tertaining character of advertising. Good for economy points out the advertis-ing’s positive effects on the nation’s economy. Fostering materialism refers to consumer worries about advertising promoting (over)consumption as the source of happiness. Corrupting values involve beliefs about advertising promoting so-cially or personally non-desirable values. Finally, falsity/no-sense concerns the misleading, not-always-fully-true character of advertising.
From our perspective a somewhat more relevant research have been completed in Hungary on a representative sample of 500 persons by NRC, Hungary’s lead-ing online marketlead-ing research agency (NRC, 2014). The Internet-based survey included an open-ended free association question: “What comes to your mind when you hear the word advertising?” Results are summarized in Table 1.
Table 1: Top free associations to “advertising”
Frequency in %
1. Irritating 14.4
2. Sales 8.9
3. Boring 7.7
4. (Too) many 6.9
5. Newness 5.9
5. Misleading 5.9
6. Call for attention 5.7
7. Wheedling 5.4
8. Product presentation, recommendation 5.2
9. Don’t like i 5.1
Source: NRC Useful or worthless? Consumer advertising research (NRC, 2014) Three negative emotional associations (irritating, boring, don’t like it) account for more than one quarter of the total associations (27.2% in total). Associations describing the supposed goal of advertising (sales, call for attention and whee-dling with a somewhat negative tonality) represent 20% of the total associations.
Two among the remaining top associations concern the information presented in the advertising (newness and product presentation/recommendation, 11.1% in to-tal), the rest is linked to the perceived overflow of advertising ((too) many, 6.9%) and the falsity of advertising (misleading, 5.9%).
Compared to Pollay & Mittal’s (1993) results for the USA, we can discover the product information (newness and product presentation/recommendation) and the falsity factor (misleading), however the dominance of negative emo-tions seems to contradict the hedonic amusement factor. This result can be partly explained by the research methodology, as free association technique
gives more opportunity for subjects to express their emotions towards the ob-ject of research.
The associations describing the supposed goal of advertising can be interpreted as an indicator of marketing literacy, but the high frequency needs further inves-tigation to be explained.
The exploratory research
In order to gain some understanding on how web 2.0 communication and market-ing literacy influenced consumers’ thoughts about advertismarket-ing, we designed and executed an exploratory research.
In order to measure attitudes towards advertising and company-consumer communication in general, we used a technique that is based on the social rep-resentation theory to map the consumers’ association network. We agree with Brown (2006) that postmodern marketing and the study of postmodern consum-ers requires more qualitative and projective methodologies than standard attitude surveys. Besides, we aimed to test social representation theory if it can yield ad-ditional insights compared to a simple free association test.
The notion of social representation was introduced into social psychology by Serge Moscovici who defines it as “system of values, ideas and practices with a twofold function; first, to establish an order which will enable individuals to ori-ent themselves in their material and social world and to master it; and secondly to enable communication to take place among the members of a community by providing them with a code for social exchange and a code for naming and clas-sifying unambiguously the various aspects of their world and their individual and group history. “ (Moscovici, 1973, p. xiii cited by Duveen&Lloyd, 1990) Our working definition is somewhat more simple: social representations are the organized ensemble of knowledge, beliefs, opinions, images and attitudes about a social subject shared by a given group (Jodelet, 1984).
We have chosen a free association test to start studying the social representa-tion of some chosen concepts, because it is a tool that is easy to understand, it is flexible and it can be self-administered (de Rosa, 2003). Our method is somewhat similar to the method used in the NRC research (NRC, 2014) as it is also based on free associations, but drawing an association network is a more complex task providing more information, because in addition to the enumeration of the as-sociations we also ask for the emotional relevance and the order of importance of the associations and the possible link between associations.
In our case, we chose four social objects to study. “Communication between company and consumer” refers to marketing communication that is the ensem-ble of the many communication tools that companies and organizations use to initiate and maintain contact with consumers and advertising is just one type of marketing communications (Arens et al. 2008). Our goal with this stimulus is to
capture consumer empowerment and the increasing communication activity of consumers.
“Marketing” is expected to give a picture about the consumers’ marketing lit-eracy. Marketing can be viewed from different perspectives including marketing as consisting of advertising, but another popular conception is that it primarily involves sales and retailing activities (Belch & Belch, 2001), we were interested in knowing the way our subjects understand marketing.
“Advertising” represents our principal interest and it was the starting point of our research. Advertising is controversial, it stirs strong emotions, it is often criti-cized; it can be a subject of public debate as well as a conversation topic among friends. For many consumers, advertising represents the ultimate and often the only company-consumer communication and very importantly, advertising has changed a lot in the past years.
Finally, “persuasion” was added to the research set, as some define advertising as a process of persuasion or persuasive communication (Arens et al. 2008).
We have chosen the free association test to start studying the social representa-tion of the stimuli, because it is a tool that is easy to understand, it is flexible and it can be self-administered (de Rosa, 2003).
methods
Our sample was university students aged between 18-25, males as well as fe-males, all are members of the y generation. We chose this segment, because we assumed that they are digitally well-educated and they use modern technology as part of everyday life. Besides, they represent an important target group to many businesses, so their thoughts about company-consumer communication and ad-vertising might interest marketing professionals who often have difficulties to reach them. We haven’t asked any socio-demographic data from them as we con-sidered it would be irrelevant. The sample size was 120 students that resulted in 90 answers by stimulus.
The free association tests were taken at two different universities at Budapest during social psychology class. The test instruments were A4 papers with three of the four stimuli (company-consumer communication, marketing, advertising, persuasion) written in the middle. Each participant got a test composed of three stimuli out of the four as we assumed that completing a test of four stimuli would take too long and it would be tiring to the subjects as well. In order to balance a given stimulus’ influence on the other stimuli’s associations, we prepared a test material with all possible orders of the stimuli (24 different versions in total).
The test was self-administered, before students had started, we gave them the detailed instructions: first they had to list all the associations that came into their mind looking at the stimulus, then they had to indicate the order of appearance of the associations, next they had to evaluate if each word was positive, negative
or neutral for them. The last two instructions was linking the associations that have a connection and indicating the importance of associations with Roman numbers starting with the most important association. Although, we noted the five different steps of completion on the board as a reminder (associations, order of appearance, emotion, link between the associations, importance of associa-tions), we couldn’t check each subject if they fill in the test properly before the end of the session.
Next, all data was registered in a computer database. As an inconvenience of self-administration and complexity (5 different steps to accomplish), some of the tests were incomplete. We chose not to exclude incomplete tests from the analy-sis, so for each analysis we are going to indicate the base size separately.
At this stage of the research, associations were categorized into groups, only minor modifications were effectuated on the corpus such as changing verbs to morphologically related nouns names or using uniformly the singular version of the given word.
Results
This paper presents the results of three stimuli: “company-consumer commu-nication” “marketing” and “advertising”. Persuasions represent a more general category, so we intend to present the results in a separate paper. Furthermore, we are going to discuss the frequency and the importance of the associations;
the emotional relevance, the content of the associations and the link between the associations will be also presented in another paper.
The average number of associations is 6.6 for both “company-consumer com-munication” and “marketing” and 7.7 for “advertising”. For each stimulus, we calculated the frequency of the associations. We also prepared a ranking based on the importance of the associations: we selected the associations that were ranked at first place and then we calculated their frequency.
“Company-consumer communication”
Table 2: Frequency of associations (“company-consumer communication”)
N=89 % of total associations % mentioned
1. Advertising 9.7% 63.3%
2. Marketing 3.2% 21.1%
3. Persuasion 2.4% 15.6%
4. Publicity 2.0% 13.3%
5. Internet 1.9% 12.2%
5. TV 1.9% 12.2%
6. Influence 1.7% 11.1%
N=89 % of total associations % mentioned
7. Media 1.5% 10.0%
7. Money 1.5% 10.0%
8. Sales 1.4% 8.9%
8. Profit 1.4% 8.9%
8. Manipulation 1.4% 8.9%
8. PR 1.4% 8.9%
Source: own research/calculation
Table 3: The top 3 most important association (“company-consumer communication”)
N=77 % mentioned
1. Advertising 17.3%
2. Marketing 6.7%
3. Consumer
ser-vice 4.0%
Source: own research/calculation
For the stimulus “Company-consumer communication”, we got 262 different associations in total. As Table 2 and 3 indicate, “advertising” was both the most often mentioned and the most important association, followed by “marketing”.
In terms of communication channel, TV and Internet are both among top as-sociations, just as “media” in general. “PR” as another tool of marketing com-munications also appears on the list of frequency. “Consumer service” that is not among the top 8 most frequent association is the 3rd important association accord to subjects.
“Marketing”
Table 4: Frequency of associations (“marketing”)
N=90 % of total associations % mentioned
1. Advertising 10.8% 71.1%
2. Sales 4.2% 27.8%
3. Money 3.2% 21.1%
4. Persuasion 2.5% 16.7%
4. Company 2.5% 16.7%
5. Market 2.4% 15.6%
5. Business 2.4% 15.6%
6. Media 2.2% 14.4%
6. Product 2.2% 14.4%
7. Commerce 2.0% 13.3%
N=90 % of total associations % mentioned
8. Call for attention 1.7% 11.1%
8. Publicity 1.7% 11.1%
8. Creative 1.7% 11.1%
8. PR 1.7% 11.1%
Source: own research/calculation
Table 5: The top 3 most important association (“marketing”)
N=73 % mentioned
1. Advertising 24.7%
2. Creative 6.8%
3. Persuasion 5.5%
Source: own research/calculation
251 different associations were given to the stimulus “marketing”. As we can see, again “advertising” is both the most frequent and the most important associ-ation. “Creative” and “Persuasion” are also among top association both in terms of frequency and importance: “PR” is mentioned more often, but “creative” is assumed more important.
Among the most often mentioned associations, we find several business re-lated expressions such as “Sales”, “Money”, “Company”, “Market”, “Business”,
“Commerce”.
“Advertising”
Table 6: Frequency of associations (“advertising”)
N=90 % of total associations % mentioned
1. TV 5.7% 44.4%
2. Media 4.2% 32.2%
3. Influence 4.0% 31.1%
4. Persuasion 3.9% 30.0%
5. Marketing 3.0% 23.3%
6. Money 2.7% 21.1%
7. Publicity 2.0% 15.6%
7. Sales 2.0% 15.6%
8. Billboard 1.9% 14.4%
Source: own research/calculation
Table 7: The top 3 most important association (“advertising”)
N=78 % mentioned
1. Media 10.3%
2. TV 5.1%
2. Money 5.1%
2. Persuasion 5.1%
2. Influence 5.1%
3. Product 3.8%
3. Creative 3.8%
3. Information 3.8%
3. Publicity 3.8%
Source: own research/calculation
301 different associations were mentioned to the stimulus “advertising”, so among the three stimuli, “advertising” owns the most diverse set of answers.
“Media” and media channels such as “TV”, “Billboard” are among the most fre-quent associations, “Media” and TV” are also the most important associations as well. Moreover, “persuasion” and “influence” are both often mentioned and important terms. “Money” and “sales” are again often associated to “marketing”.
“Product” and “information” show up only in the importance ranking, just as
“creative” that was also among the most important associations linked to “mar-keting”.
Discussion
Overall “advertising” was ranked first among the most frequent and most important associations for both “company-consumer communication” and
“marketing”. This shows that advertising is a central concept for consumers in marketing communications, and idea that is also supported by the fact that
“advertising” stimulated both the most divers set of associations and the highest number of associations per person among the three stimuli analyzed. However frequency can be also elevated because “advertising” as a stimulus had a priming effect on consumers during the test. The central position of advertising needs further examination.
Compared to past advertising beliefs and attitudes researches, among the 7 factors of Pollay & Mittal (Pollay,& Mittal, 1993), we find product information (“product”, “information”) among the most important associations and economy and business related expressions (“sales”, “marketing”) among the most frequent associations. “Creative” can be at some degree linked to hedonic amusement fac-tor as creative advertising is more amusing than a boring one and “money” might have a relation to corrupting values such as “persuasion” and “influence” can be
connected to falsity, but this hypothesis requires further investigation. Associa-tions that can be categorized as social image or fostering materialism factors are not among the most frequent or most important associations.
Comparing our results to the NRC consumer research (NRC, 2014), the most interesting finding is that negative emotional associations such as “irritating” or
“don’t like it” are missing from both the most frequent and the most important associations. “Sales” are mentioned often in both researches and “product” and
“information” can be connected to “product presentation and recommendation”.
Associations that can be linked to digitalization and web 2.0 communications are not among most frequent or most important associations, in fact “internet”
is the only association in context of “company-marketing communication” that is related to web 2.0. Furthermore, among the associations to “advertising” as a stimulus, still TV is the most dominant channel followed by billboard.
Finally we think that marketing literacy is definitely present among the as-sociations: among the most frequent associations to “marketing” we find several business and economy related expressions and also “persuasion” and “influence”
as most often mentioned and most important association for “advertising” shows that these young consumers are conscious of the goals of advertising, moreover they are capable to talk about it without high negative emotions such as “cheat-ing” or “ly“cheat-ing” and that can be a proof that they understand the function of adver-tising in the modern economy and they might be also well prepared to diminish their influential effect. However, these interesting theories need to be tested in future researches.
Limitations and further research
We are well aware that we only analyzed a small portion of the data acquired during the research, so we are planning to also analyze +/- evaluations of the associations and the links between associations. The fact that there is a difference among the set of most frequent and most important associations demonstrates that social representation theory and this free association test can yield interesting and fruitful results and it’s worth exploring further both the theory and other methodologies as well.
Although the free association test is capable to identify some semantic and evaluative aspects of the research topic, only a multi methodological approach
Although the free association test is capable to identify some semantic and evaluative aspects of the research topic, only a multi methodological approach