Crítica modelo jerarquía efectos

 Weilbacher, William M. Does advertising cause a "Hierarchy of Effects"?
Journal of Advertising Research | November 01, 2001 |

Hierarchy models of advertising effects are based on a discredited model of human thought processes. Hierarchy models of advertising effects are simplistic to an extreme. Advertising is conceived as a discrete stimulus that ultimately leads through an inflexible series of stages or steps to the ultimate response of a consumer brand selection or purcha "Does advertising cause a "Hierarchy of Effects"?  The trouble with this is that it completely ignores the wide store of information and experience that is always available to a consumer prior to and after advertising exposure as he or she thinks about or actively makes brand purchases  

In thinking about the hierarchy of advertising effects in psychological terms, a distinction must be made between the behaviorist formulation of human behavior--which has now largely been discredited in the contemporary literature of cognitive psychology--and the burgeoning understanding of human thought and behavior processes now being developed by the cognitive scientists  

As Kandel, Schwartz, and Jessell (2000) reflect about behaviorist psychology: In the first part of the twentieth century, to avoid untestable concepts and hypotheses, psychology became rigidly concerned with behaviors defined strictly in terms of observable stimuli and responses. Orthodox behaviorists thought it unproductive to deal with consciousness, feeling, attention or even motivation  

As soon as one begins to deal with the complex human processing of varied, complementary, and even contradictory simultaneous stimuli in the context of stored residues of past mental activities and experiences, one cannot reasonably conceive of a response to advertising as a routinized, predictable series of mental stages or steps  

Kandel, Schwartz, and Jessell (2000) put behaviorist psychology into contemporary perspective: "Unlike the behaviorists, we no longer focus only on the stimulus response properties of behavior; instead, we focus on the information processing in the brain that leads to behavior." Consumers simply do not think and act as behaviorist psychology would have had us believe. If a view of a specific aspect of consumer behavior--like interacting with advertising--is formulated in terms of a psychological theory that is simply not true, then we end up with an understanding that is both incorrect and totally inapplicable to the real human behavior that we are trying to understand and influence, as well as the forces that combine to cause it  

C. Hierarchy models of advertising effects assume that all advertisements have identical specific effects. Inherent in hierarchy models of advertising effects is the idea that every advertisement works in exactly the same way when it reaches consumers as every other advertisement works. In the model, "advertising" is not conceived as myriad, highly differentiated, advertisements. Rather, it is conceptualized as a single ineluctable and monolithic force  

In a typical day a consumer is exposed to literally hundreds, if not thousands, of advertisements. He or she may see, for example, a long-copy print advertisement for a brand that is packed with descriptions of brand features and benefits. He or she may also see a few minutes later a highly produced 30-second television commercial for another competing brand that makes little or no attempt to deliver rational arguments about the merits of that brand  

How could these two advertisements (stimuli) produce the same patterns of effects (responses) in the reader/viewer? In fact, it can be argued that the advertising agency creative people responsible for these differing advertisements could not, in their wildest dreams, think or seriously plan that two such different advertisements would produce the same basic effects on their recipients. In fact, they probably think that each of these individual advertisements may have quite different effects on different recipients  

Much of the creative mystique of advertising depends upon the idea that advertisements for a brand must be strikingly different from advertisements for competitive brands if they are to have any chance of successfully influencing consumers. In fact, the content of advertising varies widely just because its creators are always striving in each individual advertisement for a particular rather than a uniform response  

Jeremy Bullmore (1991) suggests the richness of the creative process in advertising: "Again and again I found myself having to explain that saying something did not mean that you have communicated it, and, almost as often, that not having said something didn't necessarily mean that you had not communicated it." D. If the postulated effects of the hierarchy of advertising effects are measurable, they must be true. A continuing problem in the fields of advertising and marketing research is the fallacy that if a measurement can be made of a construct, then the fact of the measurement proves the construct to be true  

In contemporary practice, measurements are routinely made of consumer awareness of brands, awareness of brand features, of what brands are considered before a purchase decision is made, and of brand preferences  

Clearly these measurements are consonant with the hierarchy-of-advertising-effects model. They are specifically relevan "Does advertising cause a "Hierarchy of Effects"? of 9 6/20/2002 3:25 PM to the steps or stages that consumers are postulated to pass through as advertising affects them in ways specified by the model. But if the model is wrong, the measurements are irrelevant  

The troublesome thing about such measurements is that, since they can be made, and since they are used in making decisions about advertising programs, they lead to an uncritical acceptance of the hierarchy-of-advertising-effects model  

In fact, such measurements reflect nothing more than what marketing practitioners have come to believe, erroneously, about how advertising works  

The ambiguity of measurements of such constructs as brand awareness is suggested by the late Rosser Reeves, then Chairman of the Bates advertising agency, (1961) reporting on advertising content awareness measurements for a brand handled by Bates: We found out the exact number of people who remembered the advertising of a big brand which we handle. 50% knew it and 50% did not. We kept the names and addresses of these people (something not normally done as a matter of course) and six months later went back to the same people  

Keep in mind that the same campaign was still running  

We were astonished to discover that half of the people who had known our story had now forgotten it; and half of those who had not known it could now describe it  

It is difficult to interpret a result like this on the basis of the hierarchy-of-advertising-effects model of advertising effectiveness  

BEYOND HIERARCHY MODELS OF ADVERTISING EFFECTS It is now very widely recognized that the human brain is a very complex organism. We experience the end products of its processes as clear, well-ordered, instantaneous representations of our interactions with the world within us and around us. In actuality, the brain as a totality is multifaceted and loosely organized. Information about a single subject is stored in multiple locations throughout the brain and processed and organized in a way to satisfy instantaneously our perceived informational/attitudinal needs at a particular moment in time in a particular experience context  

As Kandel, Schwartz, and Jessell (2000) put it: One difficulty with breaking down mental processes into analytical categories or steps is that our cognitive experience consists of instantaneous, smooth operations. Actually, these processes are composed of numerous independent information-processing components, and even the simplest task requires coordination of several distinct brain areas  

When we think about a particular brand, we synthesize all our stored memories from marketing information about that brand and, if we have actual experience of the brand, with that brand experience. These diverse sources of brand information are processed in parallel by the brain itself--different residual traces are simultaneously thrown up into our consciousness in an organized way. This produces the synthesis of multiple units of information and experience that we perceive as our reality of the brand, at a particular moment  

It can not now be said that the cognitive psychologists have a clear or final understanding of exactly what happens in the brain to produce the mental processes by which, as individuals, we perceive, learn, remember, and act  

This means that we may never be able to measure, let alone understand, the specific effects of marketing communications, including advertising, to which individual consumers are exposed. It also means that we may never be able to parse out the effects of advertising from all the other marketing factors and marketing communications forces that affect consumer interactions with and predispositions for and against individual brands. There may be no direct line of consumer questioning that can ever tap into exactly what happens in a person's mind either generally or specifically with respect to the perception of brands  

We may have to conclude that ultimate understanding of the effects of marketing communications, including advertising, may be illusory and depend not so much on what we as marketers and marketing students know and can discover as upon what cognitive scientists do to expand our understanding of the brain and how, exactly, it interacts with its environment