[MUSIC] 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. [MUSIC]
