Advertising Strategies

<-NARRATOR:-> Now listen to part of a lecture in a psychology class.
The professor is discussing advertising strategies.
<-FEMALE PROFESSOR:-> In advertising, urn...various strategies are used to persuade people to buy products.
In order to sell more products, advertisers will often try to make us believe that a product will meet our needs or desires perfectly, even if it's not true.
The strategies they use can be subtle, uh...friendly forms of persuasion that are sometimes hard to recognize.
In a lot of ads, repetition is a key strategy.
Research shows that repeated exposure to a message, even something meaningless or untrue, is enough to make people accept it or see it in a positive light.
You've all seen the car commercials on TV, like the one that refers to its roomy cars over and over again.
You know which one I mean.
This guy is driving around and he keeps stopping to pick up different people.
He picks up three or four people, and each time the narrator says "plenty of room for friends, plenty of room for family, plenty of room for everybody".
The same message is repeated several times in the course of the commercial.
Now the car...er...the car actually looks kind of small.
It's not a very big car at all, but you get the sense that it's pretty spacious.
You think that the viewer would reach the logical conclusion that the slogan... er... misrepresents the product.
Instead, what usually happens is that when the statement "plenty of room" is repeated often enough, people are actually convinced it's true.
Um, another strategy they use is to get a celebrity to advertise a product.
It turns out that we are more likely to accept an advertising claim made by somebody famous, a person we admire and find appealing.
We tend to think they are trustworthy.
So...um...you might have a car commercial that features a well-known race car driver.
Now it may not be a very fast car, er...it could even be an inexpensive vehicle with a low performance rating, but if a popular race car driver is shown driving it, and saying"I like my cars fast", then people will believe the car is impressive for its speed.