Analysing Consumer decision making towards advertisements involving Celebrities and

Social causes: A Neuroscientific Research Agenda

Sharad Agarwal, Dr. Tanusree Dutta & Prof.M.J Xavier

Indian Institute of Management Ranchi

Suchana Bhawan, Ranchi, Jharkhand (India), 834008

Phone: +91-7739980722

E Mail: sharad.agarwal12fpm@iimranchi.ac.in

Extended abstract (For the Track: Enhancing the effectiveness of marketing

communications through Customer Insights , Track 6)

Introduction

Corporations invest their resources into advertising their products, with an aim to increase

awareness among the consumers, build brands to gain competitive advantage, to

communicate their message to their stakeholders, capture a viewers attention, increase the

consumer awareness about the product, and induce consumers behaviour to purchase an

endorsed product etc. Celebrity endorsement has been used since long by the brand managers

to advertise their products and win the consumers, Celebrities includes from film world,

sports world and fashion world etc. The Cause related advertising have recently begun to gain

ground as large corporation have started adverting the initiatives taken by them toward the

causes supported by them for e.g. Procter & Gamble (P&G) has chosen to fight for the cause

of education and runs a series of campaigns to promote its cause with a famous tagline,

Padega India to badega India, meaning if Indian kids are imparted education, they will lead

the future growth of the country, and after the commercial , it is announced that for every

purchase of their product, they (P&G) will contribute some money for educating unprivileged

Indian kinds. In this paper we provide the findings of the previous researches, analysing both

of these kinds of advertising trends. We, for the first time, at least in the Indian context,

propose a neuro scientific framework to understand the impact of advertisements involving

celebrities or causes or both of them. We propose a model to analyse consumer decision

making towards the products of the brands involved with different kinds of advertisements

using the Electroencephalogram (EEG) and Event Related Potential (ERP), P -300 to

effectively measure the impact of each of these advertisements on the human brain.

Research Gap and Research Problem

Celebrity endorser is defined as any individual who enjoys public recognition and who uses

this recognition on behalf of a consumer good by appearing with it in an advertisement

(McCracken,1989, p.310) The use of celebrity endorsers provides a means by which brands

are able to capture attention, helping the brand stand out from the clutter (Ilicic, J., &

Webster, 2012) Celebrity endorsement could be of three types, endorser should include not

only explicit endorsements ( Celebrity endorse the brand), but also implicit endorsements

(Celebrity use the brand) and co present endorsements (Celebrity merely appear with the

brand) (Mc Cracken, 1989). All these three types of endorsements are prevalent in the

modern advertising strategies deployed by managers to build their brands.

Few studies have actually compared celebrity advertising to non-celebrity advertising to

determine their relative effectiveness. For example, Atkin and Block (1983) found that

advertisements with celebrity spokespersons had more favourable effect on consumers than

those with non-celebrities. Friedman, Termini, and Washington (1977), using advertisements

with celebrities and non-celebrities for a fictitious brand, found that the celebrity version of

the advertisement had higher scores on probable taste, advertising believability, and purchase

intention, the three dependent variables. Some scholars also reported negative findings in

their study for e.g. Menon et al. (2001) do not support the view that using celebrity

advertising is more believable or effective than non-celebrity advertising for the brands tested

in their study. In the Indian context, Dubey and Agarwal (2011) found that celebrity

endorsements give an extra edge to the companies for retaining the viewers attention. A

good celebrity-product association can capture a viewers attention, increases the consumer

awareness about the product, and induce consumers behaviour to purchase endorsed product

The use of cause related advertising is a relatively new phenomenon and more and more

companies are adopting it, some of them are ITC (for its stationary products); P & G

(Education); Hindustan Unilever (Lifebuoys, Help every child celebrate 5th Birthday) etc.

The use of celebrities in the social advertisements is however new and has not caught much

attention in the literature. These kinds of advertisements are commonly issued in the public

interest by the governments, social agencies, NGOs, other developmental agencies like

UNESCO, UNICEF etc. Some examples of these kinds of advertisements in India (with

Indian celebrities) are, Amitabh Bachhan for Pulse Polio eradication program, Aishwarya Rai

urging public to pledge their eyes for donation, Amir Khan in Satyamev Jayate etc. However,

celebrity endorsement is used by the companies to communicate their causes to the public, in

such advertisements, the celebrity becomes the mouth piece of the company to promote

companys cause, though these kind of advertisements are not very common, they are there in

the marketplace. In this paper we are interested to suggest a framework to understand the

decision making process of the consumers when they come across brands having association

with different kinds of advertisements. All of the different kinds of advertisements would

provoke different cognitive mechanisms in the human brain and hence we expect different

patterns of brand recall and consumer decisions towards the products associated with each of

these advertisements. The research problem is to find out the best way of advertising the

brands to get maximum consumer attraction and awareness.

Objective of the study

The paper aims to enhance the understanding of consumer decision making using the

fundamentals of consumer neuroscience. In this paper we discuss a neuro-scientific

framework to understand the neural correlates of the process of decision making when the

consumer is having a choice to choose from the products which were advertised with

different associations (celebrities or social cause or a combination of both). The theoretical

framework is as follows:

Theoretical Framework of the study

Analysing Consumer

Decision Making

Cause Related advertisments

With Celebrity Without Celebrity

Neutral (Non Cause Related) Advertisements

With Celebrity Without Celebrity

Research Methodology:

We propose neuroscientific framework to study the consumer decision making process. The

term Neuro Marketing is a recently invented moniker (Wilson et.al, 2008) and is used when

neuroscientific methods are applied to investigate marketing and advertising problems. This

field of research has started gaining momentum for scientific enquiry to understand consumer

behavior. It has been described as Applying the methods of neurology lab to the question of

the advertising world (Thomson, 2003 quoted in Wilson et.al, 2008). Lee et.al., (2007),

taking cue from neuro economics, which describes itself as the application of neuro scientific

methods to analyze and understand economically relevant behavior defines, Neuromarketing

as the application of neuroscientific methods to analyze and understand human behavior in

relation to markets and marketing exchanges.

The neuro scientific methods avoids the problem of relying heavily upon subjects self-

reports when it is highly unlikely that even the most determined subject could accurately

articulate his or her crucial subconscious motives (Britt, 2004). The basic set of techniques

used to generate neurological images is Electro Encephalography (EEG), Magneto

Encephalography (MEG), Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and the newest method:

functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) (Fugate, 2007). We use

electroencephalography (EEG) which has been used to explore reactions to TV

advertisements in a number of ways in the recent past (for example Rossiter et al., (2001) and

Young (2002), cited in Lee et al.,2007) and not in the so recent past (for example Krugman,

1971 and Rothschild and Hyun,1990 cited in Fisher et al., 2010). EEG measures electric

product of the brain activity, when brain undergoes any stimulus. The major advantages of

ERP methods lie in the high temporal resolutions they afford and their relatively low cost.

ERPs have been used for a long time particularly in the study of language processing,

providing potentially interesting avenues for studying consumer behavior (Shiv et al., 2005)

Data Analysis and Results:

We propose a theoretical frame work to study the impacts of the advertisements involving the

celebrities or the causes or both using the modern neuro-scientific techniques. This is a

conceptual study with an intent to integrate the developments in the neuro science to the

world of marketing.

Implications of the Study

This paper will help the academicians and practitioners alike to get acquainted with the

upcoming area of consumer neuroscience and understand the use of neuroscientific

techniques in the area of consumer research, which are found to be more accurate in their

predictions as they are able to analyse the unconscious mind and emotions of the human

being.

This study is first of its kind, in the Indian context. It would provide extremely beneficial

framework to the practitioners for analysing the advertisements, best suitable for the brand

building of their products. This would also give them a much needed framework to make

informed decision while chalking out the brand building exercise for their respective brands.

Key References

Atkin, C. and Block,M.(1983) Effectiveness of Celebrity Endorsers. Journal of Advertising

Research 23, 1 (February/March), 57-62.

Britt, B. (2004). Automakers tap consumer brains. Automotive News Europe, 9 (1), 1-22

Dubey, S. K., & Agrawal, P. (2011). Impact of Celebrity Advertisements: Bollywood vs.

Cricket Stars. Journal of Marketing & Communication, (7), 4-12.

Fisher, C. E., Chin, L., & Klitzman, R. (2010). Defining neuromarketing: Practices and

Professional Challenges. Harvard Review Psychiatry, 18(4), 230237.

Friedman, H. H., Termini, S., & Washington, R. (1976). The effectiveness of advertisements

utilizing four types of endorsers. Journal of Advertising, 5(3), 22-24.

Ilicic, J., & Webster, C. M. (2013). Celebrity co-branding partners as irrelevant brand

information in advertisements. Journal of Business Research, 66(7), 941-947

Krugman HE (1971) Brain wave measures of media involvement. Journal of Advertising

Research, 11, 310.

Lee, N., Broderick, A., & Chamberlain, L. (2007). What is neuromarketing? A discussion and

agenda for future research. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 63, 199204

Menon, K., Boone, L. E., & Rogers, H. P. (2001). Celebrity Advertising: An assessment of its

relative effectiveness.available at Retrieved June, 20, 2009.

Rothschild, M., Hyun, Y.J. (1990). Predicting memory for components of TV commercials

from EEG. Journal of Consumer Research, 16, 472478

Thompson, C. (2003). There is a sucker born in every medical prefrontal cortex. New York

Times Magazine, October 25

Wilson, R., Gaines, M., Hill, J., & Paul, R. (2008). Neuromarketing and consumer free will.

The Journal of Consumer Affairs, 42 (3), 389