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So we talked about budget brand images,

and we talked
about creating brand perceptions, and how
these brand elements work together.
But another part of this brand identity is
to persuade consumers.
So let's focus now on this
process of persuasion, or changing
people's attitudes.
And the dominant model that's used in
this, in this way
of thinking, or the dominant theory, is
called the Elaboration Likelihood Model.
And so
we'll talk a little bit about that.
And then let me focus in on the use of
celebrity spokespeople.
Because they're used frequently to help
persuade
consumers to have positive beliefs towards
a brand.
So let's start off with persuasion.
What is persuasion?
It's an active attempt to change belief
and attitude.
So marketers are trying to persuade you to
feel favorably
towards their brands and their products.
The caveat here is that it's difficult,
and why is it difficult?
It's difficult for the reasons that I've
mentioned all along.
People are ex-, expose themselves, pay
attention to
and interpret data consistent with what
they already believe.
And because they're not scientific about
it, and evenly sampling and
exposing themselves to all sorts of
different things and paying attention
to things that both support their prior
belief
and refute their prior belief, because
they're very
biased in the way they take in that
stimuli, it's hard to persuade them to
think differently.
That's not to say it's not possible, but
it is difficult.
So the dominant model in thinking about
what's the
best way to persuade consumers is the
Elaboration Likelihood Model.
And this model posits that there's two
different ways, or
two different routes, to persuasion.
There's the systematic, or central, route
and
there's the superficial or peripheral
processing route.
The central root say that if people are
motivated and they're
highly involved, and they have the
opportunity and the ability to process
marketing messages, then the way to
persuade them is through central
cues in messages.
In other words, cognitive cues.
Things that people have to think about.
Try to make a strong argument.
In order to make a strong argument, people
have to be paying attention, they
have to be motivated, and they have
to have the ability to process this
information.
That's one way.
Many times, and this is true a lot with
marketing decisions, people just aren't
motivated to think that much.
And they, maybe they just don't want to
think
that much.
Or maybe they're, just don't have the
ability, they're too tired or whatever.
In that case, central processing or
central route to persuasion will not work.
Then you will have to use the superficial
way, which is to use these peripheral cues
and so when when your opportunity,
motivation and ability to elaborate, to
cognitively process is low, then the way
to persuade people is use, is through
these peripheral cues.
Which are more automatic reactions, people
just make decisions based on these cues.
And, it's not because they thought it out
carefully.
So, what, what we're saying here is that
the consumer is exposed to marketing cues.
Now, the first thing is, you ask
the question, is the consumer motivated to
elaborate?
Are they going to to pay
attention and think about your, your
message?
If the answer is no, they're not, then
that's low involvement.
And then don't give a message they have to
think about, use peripheral cues.
On the other hand, if there's high
involvement, and
they are motivated to elaborate, then the
next question you
have to ask is, do they have the ability
to elaborate, though, that's a message
something that they can
figure out if they think about.
And, if the answer to that is yes.
Then you're going to use central route.
If the answer is no, you have to go back
to the peripheral route.
Okay.
So to get to central routing, the central
route where its systematic
argument people have to be motivated, and
they have to have the ability.
If either one of them isn't true, you
gotta go to peripheral cues.
So, what are peripheral cues?
Peripheral cues are cues that people use,
in a, it's called heuristic way.
That means a shortcut way.
They don't really think through it, they
just kind of
say, well if this is true then that must
be true.
So, for example.
Classical conditioning.
Classical conditioning says that you
persuade people
just by putting things together all the
time.
So the famous example is Pavlov's dog.
The dog was conditioned to salivate
whenever they heard a bell ring and the
way it was done is the bell rang
before they gave dog food and then every
time the dog got dog food they salivated.
After a while because of classical
conditioning, just the
ringing of the bell caused the dog to
salivate.
So in the same way in marketing, if things
are always together.
You always have Coke with hamburgers or
Coke with McDonald's.
After a while you don't even think about
it, and you
just say, well, I'm having a Big Mac, let
me have
a Coke.
That, that's a kind of notion of classical
conditioning.
It's not well thought out.
It's just, I'm persuaded to have a Coke
because I always have had one.
Reciprocity says that you gave me
something, I owe you.
Now, that may make sense, it may not, but
you're doing it just because, I owe you.
So a lot of times, direct marketers will
do
things like, put a little gift in a
charity appeal.
We'll give you stamps, or
sometimes they give you a dollar.
And the idea is, sometimes, I gave you
sometime, now you give it back to me.
It's not a cognitive argument, it's a
peripheral cue.
Consistency's another peripheral cue.
Why do you like the toothpaste you use?
A lot of times the reason that you like
the
toothpaste you use, is because that's the
one you always use.
That's the one your mother gave you.
It's not like you did this systematic
product comparison, and you decided,
this is your favorite toothpaste.
You use it just because you always liked
it.
That's consistency as the peripheral cue.
Social proof says well I like this because
everybody else likes it.
So, New York Times lately has had the most
emailed articles, people read them, why do
you read them?
Well, everybody else emailed them, they
must be good.
Or my husband chooses restaurants by the
one that has the longest lines.
If everybody's waiting on line for this
restaurant,
that must be good.
That's a social proof, a peripheral cue.
Liking says if you like me, then you like
my ideas.
This is very important, and we'll see
later for celebrity spokespeople, if
you like the celebrity spokesperson, then
you're going to like what they like.
Not necessarily a rational process but it,
it makes sense in some, in some ways.
Authority says just because I say so, you
should do it.
That's another peripheral cue.
So, because somebody in authority says you
should do something, you should do it.
It's not because you thought it out.
It, because it meets your preferences.
Just because someone told you to do it.
And the last peripheral cue that I'll just
mention today is this peripheral cue of
scarcity.
Because there aren't very many of them, it
must be good.
So some marketers use this idea of
scarcity to create product quality.
A modern one that's been using that is
Lululemon.
And Lululemon purposely does not have, you
know, they go to stock outs easily.
If you don't get there quickly, it'll,
it'll run out.
The design you might want.
And people in, in, infer from that that
it's high value, high quality product.
So all of these are scarce, are peripheral
cues.
Not well thought out central processing
arguments,
but cues that people use to persuade
themselves of one thing or another.
So now let's think about celebrity
endorsements in
terms of these two roles of, of
persuasion.
So in one way, you can use a celebrity in
a central processing way.
And in that way the idea's going to be
the, the celebrity is an expert.
And the reason that the celebrity
endorsement
matters is because that person's an expert
and therefore there's information in that
endorsement.
Celebrity as a peripheral cue is going to
be, because the celebrity's attractive, or
because I like the celebrity, then I
want to use the products that they use.
So celebrities can be used in both ways.
Either in a central, or in a peripheral
way.
When you're thinking about different
celebrities to use to help endorse your
products, there's certain things you
want to think about.
First of all, who's the target segment,
and does that target segment like that
celebrity.
So that's going to be an important thing.
Then you want to think about what's the
brand message?
And does the message of the brand, the
brand
mantra, fit the, the brand message of the
celebrity?
As, then another thing you want to think
about is how attractive is the celebrity?
Is this a popular, a, a, a positive
celebrity?
Because you don't want to take a celebrity
that nobody likes, obviously.
Other considerations are how, how costly
it is.
Celebrities can be very expensive.
Is it worth it?
Some of them are, are cheaper.
Maybe that's a better, value for your
money.
And nowadays very, very important is the
social network.
So some of the celebrities that are chosen
for endorsement is because they have a
very, very strong social network and they
have a lot of followers, and so the clout
scores and those kinds of different scores
are indicating the social connectiveness
of these
different celebrities, and all of those go
into the decision of which celebrity to
choose.
There's another thing that's out there to
rate these different celebrities.
It's called a Q-rating.
And, the Q-rating says, how appealing is
the
celebrity among those who do not know him.
It's the ratio of popularity and
familiarity.
And, it's conducted
by a particular company called Marketing
Evaluations.
And, you can get Q-ratings for different
celebrities to help
you judge which is a good celebrity and
which is
a celebrity that maybe isn't as strong and
maybe you
don't want to pay as much money for or
something like that.
So what's the I think you're probably
starting
to get the idea of how these celebrities
work.
formally we think of it as the notion of
transfer of meaning.
And that's the model that's used to
indicate the effectiveness of celebrities.
So, the idea is that celebrities have very
charged, powerful meanings.
And what you want to do is transfer the
meaning of that celebrity to your product.
So, advertising firms, marketing firms,
branding firms try to
choose a celebrity that best represents
the, the appropriate
symbolic properties of the product.
So that that meaning from that celebrity
will
then transfer to the meaning of the
product.
And celebrities are quite powerful.
There have some been some fMRI studies
that show that when you show
an image of just a normal person, certain
areas of the brain light up.
But if you show an image of a celebrity,
different areas of the brain light up.
So there's an automatic or
visceral reaction to celebrities.
They just get more attention.
and they can be very, very effective at
creating an brand image and, at
differentiating a brand.
If a celebrity's associated with one
brand, and
not another, that can be a very effective
differentiation.
And going back to this elaboration
likelihood model, when you
think of the celebrity as working in a
central processing way
we talk about that as having a credible
source.
And so in that way, the celebrity is an
effective spokesperson, because of their
expertise and their trustworthiness.
So one of the very effective, at the time,
spokespeople for Nike was Tiger Woods.
Now, obviously, there's been some
controversy
around Tiger Woods in more recent time.
But when Tiger Woods was the first
spokesperson for Nike Golf he
worked in two ways.
His, he was very credible as an endorser
for golf
products because he was such a successful
golfer and obviously you
think there's some expertise in him, in
his golfing ability
and he knows what he's talking about with
regard to product.
That's a central processing kind of use of
Tiger
Woods and that's source credibility, he's
a credible source.
The other way of thinking about Tiger
Woods
is he's also an attractive source, people
liked him
at the time, they were very familiar with
him.
And anything he did, people would like.
So he was used as a spokesperson not only
for golfing and for Nike, but he's also
used for other products which were not
necessarily based
on his expertise, but just based on his
attractiveness.
And when he got into some scandal and some
issues
where his attractiveness was not as
strong, some of those
endorsements were dropped because he was
no longer an attractive source.
The ones that tended to stay with Tiger
were based more on his credibility, as a
source.
And you can see when you think about these
different methods of persuasion why
some companies might keep him and some
companies might not want to keep him.
and the ways the celebrities and models
are
used in these advertisements and
endorsements is they
can say there's an explicit mode.
They can say, I endorse this product.
I believe in this product.
There's an implicit mode that says, well I
use this product.
if there's an imperative mode that says,
well you should use this product.
and then there just can be these
co-present that, that, that celebrities
around this product.
So a lot of product placement.
A lot of fashion companies give their
celebrities their clothes
to wear so the celebrity's just wearing
their clothes,
and that is a kind of endorsement as well.
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