What was the last impressionable advertisment you remember?

            What was the last advertisement you remember watching, hearing, or seeing? Consumers see hundreds of advertisements per day and are overwhelmed with product and company information. Advertisements and marketing efforts can be seen in everyone's daily life. For example, today I heard advertisements on the radio driving to school, print advertisements throughout campus, bus billboards driving home, commercials watching television, and even on my social media accounts. I believe that marketers must effectively reach their consumer base and provide advertisements that offer information about their product or services. In order to retain a consumer's attention, the advertisements must not only be informative but also entertaining and impressionable. What works best in catching your attention? Is it humor, or an emotional appeal or an educational advertisement that will make you stop and pay attention? For me, I find humour advertisements have the longest impression and stay in my memory the longest. Below is an advertisement that is able to provide branding information with a humours approach. 

                        

            A critical element of consumer behaviour is learning and memory (Solomon, White and Dahl 2013). Marketers must create and implement advertisements that help a consumer learn about their product, but also remember the brand. A main goal of marketers is to increase the consumers evoked set so the next time the consumer is shopping, they remember their product or service as an alternative (Solomon, White and Dahl 2013). A marketer's goal is to involve the consumer in the memory process. The memory process is made up of four steps including external inputs, encoding, storage and retrieval (Solomon, White and Dahl 2013). Marketers want to provide consumers with information, in the hopes that they will use the information in later dates when purchasing the product or service. Each step in critical in developing advertisements for consumers and must be analyzed thoroughly (Solomon, White and Dahl 2013). Below is the memory process as summarizes by Michael Solomon, Katherine White, and Darren W. Dahl in the Consumer Behaviour textbook.  


           

            In my personal opinion, some of the funniest and more impressionable advertisements come from the Super Bowl. Huge companies pay millions of dollar for a commercial slot that will be televised during the Super Bowl. Some companies take a humours approach while some try an emotional appeal. Although all the advertisements are very different, I believe they are have one common goal: to stand out and be memorable. They want to increase their brand awareness which will hopefully subsequently increase company sales. A personal favourite of mine is the Budweiser commercials. Since the 2014 Super Bowl, the commercial has been viewed on YouTube over 52 million times. I think it's incredible the reach advertisements can have in this age with the internet and social media sharing. Budweiser successfully created an commercial that was shared worldwide and remembered by consumers. It's worth the watch but you might need to grab a tissue!

        
                      Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQB7QRyF4p4



            What do you think of the Budweiser commercial? Do you think humour or emotional appeal have a more lasting affect? How can companies improve their consumers memory?


References

Solomon, Michael, Katherine White, and Darren W. Dahl. 2013. Consumer Behaviour: Buying, Having, Being Sixth Edition. Canada : Pearson.