Six factors that enhance a consumer’s attention

Consumers are bombarded with information and one of the challenges of marketing is “getting noticed”. On page 63 of your text book, six factors that enhance a consumer’s attention are discussed. For this assignment you will find a product or service that has gone to the extreme to “get noticed” and write an essay discussing each of the six factors associated with your product/service of choice.

Introduction

Marketers use the theories of consumer behavior to make their advertisement and other promotions in such a way that they can attract as much consumers as possible. If an advertisement is not notices, it would mean that advertisers have failed in their goal of properly promoting a product or a service. The aim of this paper is to find an advertisement and explain how it has utilized the six factors explained by Babin & Harris (2013). These factors are intensity of stimuli, contrast, movement, surprising stimuli, size of stimuli and involvement. I am going to explain these factors one by one in the coming sections of this paper.

Dentyne Frost Bites Gum Advertisement

URL of the Advertisement:

This is a funny but touching an extreme advertisement. In this advertisement a male and a female are travelling in a taxi when the male consumes a lot of Dentyne Frost Bites Gums and his head is frozen. The taxi driver is also frightened and applies the car brakes which chops the head off of the male setting in the back seat. I would now be applying the six factors to this advertisement.

Intensity of Stimuli

This advertisement has a really strong stimuli. First is the head of the person getting frozen got my attention really quickly. I was unable to ignore this stimuli. The second time when the head of the person chopped off his body, I had to notice it. Though I believe that it was a bit extreme. It was funny but still it represented the death of a person in my opinion due to consuming a product which is not what I would want a product to do with me. I think that could have use a bit less extreme condition that what they actually showed. Also research has indicated that people get more quickly desensitized to an extreme stimuli than a lighter stimuli (Dijksterhuis & Smith, 2002). Therefore the effects of this advertisement would not be long lasting.

Contrast

The advertisement is able to create a situation where the contrast is clearly visible. I mean that one person’s head is frozen and the other are scared. The audience of this advertisement would definitely be able to notice the contrast on an unconscious level.

Movement

The advertisement is full of sudden movements. The last moments of the advertisement have utilized stopping a movement i.e. the taxi applying its brakes ad stopping suddenly.

Surprising Stimuli

I think the frozen head is a really surprising stimuli for the audience. This is not something anyone would expect. It did surprised me.

Size of Stimuli

The size of the stimuli is not larger to the overall scene of the advertisement. I think that the extremity of the stimuli fulfils this deficiency.

Involvement

If I talk about my emotional involvement as it has been explained in the textbook, I would say that the advertisement does not have an emotional appeal. It is just based on having some funny advertisement in front of you that is asking you to buy some cool mint. I mean that it does get you involved for a few seconds but not on an emotional level.

Conclusion

The above six factors can be greatly utilized to develop advertisements that can have a greater impact on its viewers. I think that it would not be possible for all advertisement each time to take full advantage of the above six factors but the advertisers can look at their target audience and decide which factors should be emphasized more than others.