Marketing 312 GMU Week 6 Attention and consumer behavior

In Module 6 we talked a lot about the Perceptual Process.  Now it is time to apply some of these course concepts related to attention to actual consumer behavior (yours) and marketing tactics.

Remember – you only submit two (of the four) assignments for the class.Submit your assignment (properly formatted and named, Word document) Write-ups are to be at least three (3) and no more than five (5) pages in length.*

** IMPORTANT – You may not use examples that were used in class or the text. **

Please be thorough and specific in your answer to all parts of these questions.  However, you SHOULD NOT do external “research” for the assignments.

For this second assignment (also described in your syllabus), you will need to focus on two ads that caught your attention (no external research required here).

According to some research, consumers are bombarded with thousands of commercial messages every single day.  As a result, marketers are constantly battling to gain consumers’ attention.  There are many different strategies/techniques that have been found to be attention getting.  We discussed a number of these in class and some are discussed in the text.

Your job for this assignment is to note those marketing communications that successfully grabbed your attention. Specifically, you need to describe two advertisements, from two different ad categories (e.g., TV, radio, billboards, signs, in-store, magazines, newspapers, on-line (including social media), mobile), that grabbed your attention recently (within the last three months).  These should be recent ads (within the last 3 months) you actually were exposed to as a consumer – NOT ones you “researched” on the Internet.

For each of the ads separately you should:

1.  Include the ad or describe it in detail (so I’ll be able to know specifically what it is.  Providing a URL is not sufficient).  Describe specifically where you saw the ad.

2.  Describe any other ads (or other marketing communications) that were present in your selected ad’s immediate environment (and that were, therefore, competing for your attention). 

For example, this could include the other ads in a TV commercial break, other ads in the magazine/newspaper, the presence of salespeople, other radio ads, etc. 

You should be pretty specific with your descriptions – e.g., how many other ads, the types of messages in the ads, how effective these other ads were, etc…

3.  Describe any other stimuli (i.e., non-marketing – e.g., roommate talking to you, music playing, etc…) that were competing for your attention as well at that time.

4.  This is the primary focus of the assignment:

Using attention-related concepts from class and the text describe why you think this particular ad message was successful at grabbing your attention.  In other words, what specific attention concepts can be used to explain why these ads caught your attention? (see class notes and text for examples of these – these include e.g., characteristics of the stimulus [ad], characteristics of the situation, and/or characteristics of the individual [you]…).