Advertease: The Itch and the Scratch of Advertising (Nutshell)

Not having a well-developed body of advertising theory, both theoreticians and practitioners of advertising, make assumptions about the chain of events that take place between advertisement exposures and resulting audience behaviour.The basic question here could be stated as -- “How Advertising Works?” The answer to this question has eluded academics, psychologists, marketing or advertising practitioners and even the sociologists or anthropologists for long. It appears possible to divide the main current, theoretical formulations of the advertising process into four; Pressure-Response Theories; Active-Learning Theories; Low-Involvement Theories; and Dissonance-Reduction TheoriesAll the four streams of thought in advertising suggest that there is no consensus about how consumers interact with advertising and how these specific interactions lead to particular results in the market place. Most theorists are trying to believe that there are only three elements in the process, that is, learning sequence, attitude change and behaviour change and any attempt to explain the process of advertising effects has only to establish the right sequence of these three elements is only unfortunate. Advertising needs to be viewed as a marketing tool that performs a necessary balancing function by synchronizing the process of mass consumption. We are now a knowledge economy with productive operations of mass processes. On a macro basis, advertising reduces the time between production and consumption by joining the technology of communications with the technology of manufacture.The managerial approach that is being taken up here is that effectiveness is a function of how the process is conceptualised. Advertising effects are being taken as a binding glue or a system of information that causes the congruence in the three distinct images, viz., the customer's image; the product's image and the seller's image. Since advertising, like marketing, is meant for the mutual benefits of buyers and sellers, efforts would be necessary to upgrade, modify in quality and quantity, and design advertising in a way that it becomes more and correlatively informative and binding.