Design Principles in Advertisements (III.)

This series analyzes the design principles often used in advertisements and discuss how these principles are used to attract attention, influence the opinion or convince the potential consumer for purchase.

Personal and character attributes in advertisement

Attractiveness bias

Advertisements often use attractive, well-dressed people to communicate intelligence, competency and morality. This is closely tight to evolution process where good looking means healthy and healthy individual is better choice for mating. We tend to be more attracted to such messages and believe them more.

“Mature faced individuals are communicating authority and power”

Baby-face bias

For communicating authority and power, as in the Tag Heuer advertisements above, mature faced individuals with sharp face features are used. This evokes the message that when you have that watches you will also posses such attributes like individuals on the poster. On the other hand, people with baby faces tend to be seen as more naïve, helpless and honest and they should be used when communicating innocence.

Face-ism

The subconscious message can be also send by the means of how much face is shown on the picture. The big ratio of face to image attracts focus on person’s intellectual and personal attributes, which is particularly beneficial during political campaigns. Low ratio focus attention on physical and sensual attributes which can be exploited, for example by persuading people to buy diamonds.

 

Most average facial appearance effect

Advertisers also know our preference about the faces they put on their posters. We tend to prefer faces in which the eyes, nose, lips and other features are close to the average of a population. It is due to evolution filtering out the extremes, which usually means some disease or other problem. Therefore, average means healthy.

Cognitive dissonance

How do you react when you read the words “HEY, YOU’RE FUNNY AGAIN?” You probably got curious in what is going on. You just got interested in the advertisement without even reading all the text on it.  The highlighting of the advertisement has at-tracted your attention so that it can play dirty game with you. It tries to persuade you that if you buy some diamond necklace to your wife or girlfriend it will make you more interesting for her. But you are not stupid and you know it does not work like that.  You know they just want to manipulate you so you will not rush into first jewelry shop and buy the necklace. Not very successful advertising campaign you might think.  But after some time the Valentine’s Day is coming, your relationship is not doing very well and you want to save it by some thoughtful present. Now, your old memory will remind itself – hey, if I buy her that necklace she will think I am funny again. It might save your relationship but it will definitely save the success rate of the advertisement cam-paign. This is the concept similar to brainwashers that you eventually come to believe what you say. It is called cognitive dissonance and it is state when a person’s cognitions conflict. This is the state one does not want to be in, so we act to solve the conflict. Either we believe our initial attitudes and stick with them or we resolve the conflict by doing what they want us to do and get over with it.

Picture superiority effect

Everybody knows that a picture is worth a thousands words. And of course, pictures are better remembered than words. That’s why advertisements are composed mostly of images and only very little text. When right symbolic images are used and the accompanying text is reinforcing the presented idea it creates very strong message that we can easily recall when deciding between buying product A or B.

Von Restorff effect and threat detection

Our memory works in a very specific way. Sometimes we want to memorize specific thing but it just simply will not stick there even after multiple repetitions. But some things, we see only by the blink of the eye will stick there perfectly for a very long time. How is it possible? There are some rules that respect the physiology of our brain and makes memorization super efficient. One of such rules is von Restroff effect. It is a phenomenon of memory in which noticeably different things are more likely to be recalled than common things. Have you ever seen panda with a tuna fish body? Or a rhino mutated with tuna fish? These images are very distinct from what you see daily and they will probably stick in your head for a very long time.
This advertisement takes advantage of another ability we are especially good at – threat detection. We are able to detect threatening stimuli more efficient than non-threatening. This is again based on our evolution when our prehistoric ancestors had to be aware of predators. Now, it is great way how to rapidly attract attention.