Advertising Theories

Since the early 1900s, scholars have attempted to discern whether advertising has its own distinctive theories because it seemed that any serious profession should draw from a systematic analysis of its trade rather than from chance or instinct. With U.S. advertising expenditures at about $149 billion in 2007 (about 1.1% of the total U.S. gross domestic product), there is no doubt that advertising can be looked at as a serious industry. Yet when Walter Dill Scott, director of the Psychological Laboratory of Northwestern University, conducted his research in 1903 for his work on advertising theories, he could not find any reference to a theory other than psychological approaches. Even more contemporary works, such as the well-known title How Advertising Works, still describe the advertising process as a strategic communication procedure whose function is to create a psychological (and subsequently behavioral) change in a potential consumer of a product, service, or idea. Thus, when we talk about advertising theories, we basically talk about theories of consumer psychology.

Lacking its own theories but operating at the intersection of business and social sciences, advertising has not only borrowed from these disciplines but often attracted these disciplines to engage with it and explain the advertising process and its success with their own models and theories. In general, the major influence of advertising seems to occur in the area of consumer perception of a brand. To that extent, advertising must understand the meaning an object has over the life of a consumer, as well as the limits of these cultural definitions, before trying to amplify this object into a brand. Irving White provided a fitting example with the social values implied by the concept of perfume. Given that this concept invokes ideas of femininity for many individuals in the U.S. culture, advertising of male cosmetics has to carefully sidestep beliefs about femininity and narcissism. At the same time, this example illustrates how conceptual valuations of an object or idea—ideas, beliefs, feelings, and actions expressed by members of a culture—can shift over time. Today's brand advertising of male-oriented cosmetic products is different from that of just 20 or 30 years ago for the very reason that perceptions of men using perfume have changed.

The idea of how people come to understand and relate to artifacts is of interest to social psychology and anthropology. As thinkers such as George Herbert Mead and Jean Piaget have indicated, the relationship between objects and users is dynamic; as individuals acculturate into the larger society, they redefine their relationship to an object in accordance with the values frame of their environment. Culture, in other words, fills a product with meaning based on biological, social, and psychic needs the product fulfills. In other words, consumers purchase not just the plain product but also the multitude of meanings associated with the product. The function of advertising is to create subcategories of values and needs within the social structure and to connect these with the product. Consumers then select those brands whose sets of implied experiences fit into the subgroup with which they identify.

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