Advertising Psychology: How Thinking Versus Feeling Impacts Your Advertising Response Rates
The average consumer is exposed to an enormous volume of advertising every 24 hours. We’ve gone from the average adult exposed to 500 ads a day in the 1970s to as many as 5,000 ads a day today That’s about 2 million ads a year that the average person sees! This includes radio, television, search, social media, and print ads. In fact, 5.3 trillion display ads are shown online each year Since we are exposed to so much advertising, how do advertisers and marketers make sure their ads stand out? Psychology.
Great advertising taps into either our emotional or rational response. Emotional response to an ad has far greater influence on a consumer’s intent to purchase than the actual ad content. By tapping into pride, love, unique achievements, empathy, loneliness, friendships, or memories – you can double the response rate of your advertisement.
Within the content of the ad, tone, color, voice, verbiage and color can have a dramatic impact on the perception of an advertisement. This infographic, Thinking vs. Feeling: The Psychology of Advertising, created by the University of Southern California’s
Master of Science in Applied Psychology Online Program, breaks down the two types of emotive response to advertising:- Empathy – an advertisement makes people feel closer to your brand.
- Creativity – an advertisement makes people feel your brand is imaginative and ahead of the game.
The infographic also provides three great examples of the real world advertising that takes consumers on the rollercoaster of emotions, from Dove, Coca-Cola, and Google.