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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: [email protected]
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.
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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,
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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
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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.
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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
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Britt, B. (2004). Automakers tap consumer brains. Automotive News Europe, 9 (1), 1-22
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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
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Menon, K., Boone, L. E., & Rogers, H. P. (2001). Celebrity Advertising: An assessment of its
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The Journal of Consumer Affairs, 42 (3), 389