'Hard-sell' can turn thinking buyers off

By DITA DE BONI

Are you the type of person who prefers slapstick to satire, buys a surfboard based on the endorsement of Pamela Anderson and feels empathy with the phrase "thinking is not my idea of fun?"

If you answer an emphatic "yes" to any or all of these questions, you may be the butt of jokes to the average high-brow.

To a marketer you have your purposes, and to an advertiser you represent a creative challenge, because you are more likely to be persuaded to buy dishwashing liquid promoted by sexy Andrea from The Corrs than by sensible Madge from Palmolive.

In marketing-speak, you would be described as having a "low need for cognition."

If people such as you were the target audience for a particular product, advertisers would try reaching you with humour, celebrity endorsements and funky music - avoiding anything that would make you break out into a mental sweat.

Of course, it is not as simple as that. But essentially, buyers can be broadly broken down into two groups depending on the technique of persuasion that works best on them: those more likely to evaluate a product on aspects of the advertisement which are not related to the message itself, and those more likely to form opinions by analysing information presented in an advertising message (high need for cognition, or high NC).

John Cappacio and Richard Petty first presented the marketing world with the Need for Cognition theory in 1982.

Since then, thousands of people have been subject to a battery of tests to ascertain their place on the cognition scale.

Respondents indicate their level of agreement or disagreement to a range of statements such as "I only think as hard as I have to" and "I prefer simple to complex problems."

People openly admit to agreeing with statements such as "I would rather do something that requires little thought than something that is sure to challenge my thinking abilities."

Stephanie Wong is in her final year of a Marketing MA at Auckland University and has produced a thesis that adds a substantial chapter to volumes of findings on how the Need for Cognition theory can sell everything from toothpaste to turtlenecks.

She looked at comparative advertisments, which list a bunch of attributes of one brand against a bunch of attributes of another.

She then asked whether it was more effective to state a conclusion at the end of the advert ("the obvious choice is Brand X"), or let the audience draw its own conclusion ("which would you choose?").

The study exposed 261 male and female students - representing both personality types - to adverts for a fictitious brand of cellphone.

One advert listed the "facts" about the brand compared with others and asked consumers to "decide for themselves," while the other listed "facts" and then urged the viewer to "choose Samsonic."

The conclusion was that viewers who had a high need for cognition, or analysed the information presented in the advert more thoroughly, were markedly more likely to have a favourable impression of the advert if they were left to make a decision for themselves.

The group with the low need for cognition were unaffected by the explicitness of the conclusion.

"But if you provide a conclusion, especially in a comparative advertisement and especially to high NCs, they perceive you as being aggressive and having a hard-sell."

Ms Wong says that including an explicit tagline can have a "boomerang" effect on high need for cognition buyers, who would be turned off by the hard-line approach and would prefer to make up their own minds.

"For the high NC consumer, phrases such as 'decide for yourself' and 'you decide' can encourage individuals to draw their own conclusion, which may be considered as more credible than if a conclusion was supplied by an advertiser.

"Obviously, the crucial thing is to understand the consumer you are trying to reach - that's the hardest part," she says. "Then you can decide which technique works best."

Comparative advertising, which comprises around 5 per cent of advertising overall, is gaining popularity as a selling technique.

Industry figures do not attribute this to any one factor, but many say an upswing in competitiveness overall in business has allowed media outlets to feel more comfortable in printing adverts that draw comparisons with other brands.

As well as the high need for cognition, other traits including personality, ethnicity and gender can contribute to how successful a line of persuasion is.

The Auckland University study did not break down participants by gender or ethnicity. But a recent study from the University of Oregon suggested, for example, that Japanese consumers preferred more "informative" adverts than Americans.