اثرات نمونه ها در کمپین های ارتباطات بازاریابی

This study expands upon research on exemplification persuasiveness by examining advertising messages. Using the issue of organ donation, Study 1 compares the effect of exemplar versus base-rate information on credibility, emotionality (arousal, pleasure, and dominance), and the intention to donate. Results show that participants exposed to exemplars demonstrate higher behavioral intention, emotional arousal, and credibility than those exposed to statistical arguments. Study 2 evaluates the effect of two stylistic characteristics of exemplars, the use of photographs and quotations, on the same dependent variables. The findings illustrate that the use of only the exemplar's pictures has a significant impact on the intention to donate and emotional arousal.

Although media outlets frequently use base-rate data as a way to provide credible, factual, and hard information, they increasingly rely more on the use of personal experiences or “exemplars” as a source of information to persuade an audience (Callison & Potter, 2000). In fact, data from the United States and Germany show that approximately half of the TV reports and more than one third of the TV commercials contain a “man in the street” viewpoint (Zillmann & Brosius, 2000). Exemplars are illustrative short quotations or case reports that depict the typical characteristics of a group of events or people (Brosius, 1999). Journalists, media producers, and advertisers commonly use exemplars because of their authenticity and attention-getting power (Gibson & Zillmann, 1994). In the literature, a vast majority of contemporary communications, marketing, and psychology scholars support this use because they find that consumers do not make great efforts to attend or process media messages. In this vein, the limited capacity approaches largely develop the idea that a person's processing of messages is not infinite but restricted, and that the processing depends mainly on his or her interest and the nature of the message's structure and complexity (Gunter, 1987, Lang, 2000 and Nisbett and Ross, 1980). Exemplars are usually easier to attend to, code, remember, and comprehend than base-rate information even under low-involvement circumstances (Zillmann, 2006). Cognitive scholars conceptualize the automatic information processing associated with exemplars in terms of heuristics that are shortcuts or automatisms performed in a nonconscious way to reduce the mental effort in decision making (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). Two kinds of heuristics explain the use of individual examples in the formation of beliefs: the representativeness and availability heuristics (Tversky and Kahneman, 1973 and Zillmann and Brosius, 2000). The representativeness heuristic posits that judgments about events or people are frequently extrapolations based on the scrutiny of a few individual examples. This technique allows people to make inferences and to create or modify their attitudes regardless of the size of the sample. The availability heuristic claims that individual examples can greatly affect the judgments about people and events basically because people can access and retrieve examples from memory more quickly (Zillmann, 2006). Base-rate information, which is usually in the form of quantitative data about an issue, tends to be less powerful in the formations and changes of attitudes and beliefs (Zillmann, Gibson, & Sargent, 1999). Researchers explain this phenomenon as the information tending to be less attention-getting because of its more pallid and complex character. But another proposed hypothesis is the base-rate fallacy. This hypothesis proposes that although one can consider numerical information to be more reliable than exemplars, people tend to base most of their decisions on the characteristics of specific examples ( Tversky and Kahneman, 1973 and Zillmann and Brosius, 2000). Assuming that the exemplars exert greater influence on audiences, several studies explore the specific characteristics of this feature, particularly in the fields of news packaging and “persuasive messages” (but not advertisements). Gibson and Zillmann (1994) examine people reading news stories about carjackings that contain either base-rate information or exemplars depicting different levels of distortion. They conclude that people exposed to more extreme exemplars rated that problem more serious than those who read news stories with lower levels of distortion. Furthermore, respondents exhibited stronger affective reactions towards stories illustrated with exemplars. Similarly, Kopfman, Smith, Yun, and Hodges (1998) compare the use of statistical information versus testimonial storytelling. Although they detect that base-rate messages are more persuasive, they also observe more intense affective reactions and higher credibility associated with exemplars. Aust and Zillmann (1997) examine the way in which the degree of emotionality of victim exemplification in news stories affects the perception of social issues. The authors demonstrate that exemplars can amplify the magnitude of these events. In a similar fashion, Zillmann et al. (1999) use an article about accidents in which they manipulate the text and a picture with an injured person being moved into an ambulance. They find that regardless of the level of vividness of the text, the image of the ambulance increases the perception of risk. Paradoxically, few studies analyze the power of exemplars in the context of marketing communications. Callison and Potter (2000) is an exception; the study examines the effect of exemplars on audience recall in the print advertising of fictitious products. They observe that audiences attend to exemplars more than to base-rate information when asked to recall advertising claims of product effectiveness. Limon and Kazoleas (2008) investigate the power of exemplars to reduce the generation of counterarguments and overall responses to a message compared to statistical evidence by using public service announcements (PSA). Although they do not detect differences in terms of persuasion, they demonstrate that participants exposed to exemplars produce significantly fewer counterarguments than those exposed to statistical evidence. Due to the scarcity of evidence in the field of marketing communications and particularly in investigating the features of exemplars in advertising, this paper seeks to expand the understanding of the use of exemplars in marketing campaigns. Study 1 examines the differential effect of base-rate information and exemplars in terms of emotional impact, credibility, and persuasion. Study 2 analyzes two relevant features of exemplars: the effects of pictures and the person used in the narrative (first versus third person) in terms of the same dependent variables.

This study provides evidence in favor of the persuasive power of exemplars within the context of marketing campaigns. In both the within and between subject comparison, people exposed to exemplars express a greater intention to donate than those exposed to base-rate information. Further, the findings show the stronger influence for exemplars over base-rate information at the cognitive (credibility) level and partially at the emotional level (arousal). These findings are, in general terms, consistent with the previous evidence. Previous studies support the idea of the superiority of exemplars as persuasive tools (Baesler & Burgoon, 1994). Similarly, the stronger arousal reported by participants provides partial (but not total) support to the previous findings of Kopfman et al. (1998) that postulate stronger affective reactions (PAD) from exemplified stories. These findings mean that the presence of exemplars seems to not affect either the enjoyment (negative–positive valence associated with the advertisement) or the perception of control over the environment (dominance). This work also examines the power of using quotations and pictures. Significant differences appear with the intention to donate and arousal in the presence of pictures. These findings are consistent not only with the strong influence of arousal in the audiences, but also with previous evidence about the significant effect of pictures on recipients' mental activation and the persuasive power of individual examples (Lang, 2000). The absence of a credibility effect in the case of pictures is counterintuitive. Prior research supports the idea that the presence of pictures can increase the perception of credibility among the members of an audience, at least in the case of news stories (Bracken, 2006). Altogether, these results show, firstly, that some of the main postulates of exemplification theory apply to advertisements, at least those devoted to promoting issues of public interest. Secondly, these results confirm the relevance of using exemplars as a powerful tool for developing effective advertisements in terms of the mental activation of the audience (and potentially in increasing the level of attention and processing) and persuasion. Finally, this study is an initial effort in this field. More research is necessary to understand the characteristics of the use of exemplars in marketing communications campaigns. A particular relevance exists for learning the specific characteristics of exemplars in proper commercial advertising as opposed to social marketing campaigns, which might be the least believable of the sources of product information (Obermiller & Spangenberg, 2000).