Blog Post #4
Advertisement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wr4v1wFS_OY
The people who have a high ego-involvement in this ad are people with a lot of wealth or money, and the people who have a low ego involvement in this ad are people who don’t have a lot of wealth or money. Ego involvement refers to how central an issue is in our lives (Pg. 172), so in this case, this ad wouldn’t persuade or speak to anyone without a lot of money who knew they couldn’t afford this car. However, if you do have money, then buying this car is an option you could consider: so you will care a lot more about an advertisement for such an expensive product. Ego-involvement can impact the ‘contrasting’ and ‘assimilation’ of a person's attitudinal anchors because if you have a high latitude of rejection, you may decipher a certain message to be further from your attitudinal anchors than it really is, a term referred to as ‘contrasting’. On the contrary, if you have a high latitude of acceptance, you may decipher a message to be closer to your attitudinal anchors than it really is, which is what ‘assimilation’ is referred to as.
The audience for this message is wealthy people with a lot of money, and those who might like fast cars, as indicated by the race-car imagery throughout the advertisement. The peripheral route is referred to as when a message offers a mental shortcut to accepting or rejecting it “without any active thinking about the attributes of the issue or the object of consideration.” (pg. 183). One of the peripheral cues in this advertisement which would help play into that is ‘Social’, or in other words, ‘quick-everyone is doing it’. We see this with the way the man tries to look ‘cool’ throughout the advertisement, seeing his car as a race-car, and the way the woman looks on in astonishment as he is driving by- like she’s very impressed.
Cognitive dissonance is an adverse drive that goads us to be consistent (pg. 194). In the case of if I bought the car being advertised here, I believe the dissonance I would face would be the feeling of responsibility I’d have to this car. For example, my car can often be messy, so now feeling like I had an expensive work of art that I’d have to keep extremely clean and take care of it- unlike how I might slack off on my own car- would be very stressful and is not something I’m used to. If I wasn’t careful, I might experience the selective exposure dissonance, where I’d tell myself that the cars price didn’t matter, that I didn’t have to take care of it, and that it would be okay if the inside wasn’t clean: so that I wouldn’t stress over having to take care of it. I would avoid the information about the cars value and artistry.
Hi Justin!, great post this week . Your responses were well thought out and to the point. I agree with your approach on cognitive dissonance because I feel like if I had that car as well, I'd be feeling overwhelmed just thinking about the insurance payments, the parts of the car when and if needed to be fixed as well as the guilt I would feel for actually buying the car instead of leasing it for personal reasons would make me feel a bit of dissonance. I liked how you brought in the concept of selective exposure because it shows how we can rationalize why our actions were justified in a a sense to not make us feel bad about doing so.
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