Advertising Evaluation

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The press article entitled “ Flattery will get an Ad Nowhere” essential message was to convey to the readers that “flattering” the consumer, advertising beauty-enhancing products, has as adverse effect and makes the consumer feel less beautiful. The source of this article came from the journal article “The Self-Activation of Advertisement Ads can affect whether and How Consumers Think about the Self”. The journal article includes four studies. The first study deals with how the enhancing products within an advertising context may address people’s self-concept, translating into activation of the self (Trampe et al 2011). In the second study, it is hypothesized that viewing advertised enhancing products in an advertisement context also affects how consumers think about themselves (Trampe et al 2011). In study three, the role of self-activation is investigated as the unique factor associated with the effects of enhancing products in advertisements (Trampe et al 2011). The purpose of study four was to investigate the mediating part of appearance-related self-discrepancy initiation in creating the influence of enhancing products in advertisements on self-evaluations (Trampe et al 2011). For the purpose of analyzing this journal article, the primary focus will be on study two. Study two contains the most material that is directly related to the press article.

Before conducting the study, experimenter conducted a Pilot Test. The Pilot Test was conducted in order to determine what products would be used in the experiment. Because the experiment is rooted around attractiveness, experimenters needed to make sure that the products used were attractiveness-related products. Thirty-five students participated in the study for course credi...

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...hemselves higher or lower on the questionnaire depending on how anonymous the results will be. I’m sure none of the participants wanted it to get out that that they thought of themselves in certain ways.

Overall, I thought the experiment was well put together. It did display the correlation between advertised and unadvertised products as well as their correlation to self-evaluation. The experimenter conducted his study in such a way to have high internal validity. The press article portrays the journal articles findings pretty well. They put the key points in the article, while not degrading the quality of the journal article.

Works Cited

Trampe,D., Stapel, D.D., and Siero, F.W (2011). The self-activation effect of advertisement: ads can affect whether and how consumers think about the self. The Journal of Consumers Research. Doi:10.1086/657430

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