Behaviour Change

PROPAGANDA FOR CHANGE is a project created by the students of Behaviour Change (ps359) and Professor Thomas Hills @thomhills at the Psychology Department of the University of Warwick. This work was supported by funding from Warwick's Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning.

Tuesday, March 20, 2018

'Official Supermarket of Team GB'




Aldi recently launched new adverts to run alongside the winter Olympics.
The adverts are short, fun and effective, but why?

High Status Admirer Altercast

The advert features well-known British winter Olympic legends and dancing on ice judges
Torvill and Dean, demonstrating the use of high status admirer altercast (Pratkanis, 2007).
Pratkanis (2007) notes the effectiveness of this as a method of persuasion as individuals
tend to want to be part of something that people they aspire to be like are. Moreover,
these celebrities are placed in unexpected places and are not shown throughout the whole
advert. Petty, Brinol and Priester (2008), argue that when there is a surprising element of
a message, its persuasion increases. The advert also employs the use of a similarity
altercast (Pratkanis, 2007), by featuring a character similar to those it is targetting. Tidwell,
Eastwick and Finkel (2012), demonstrated that if an individual thinks someone is similar to them, they are more likely to like them.

Limited choice

The advert compares the price of a shop at the ‘Big 4’ versus at Aldi. The choices are
limited, however, as instead of showing the price for each of the big four supermarkets,
they are grouped by an average, establishing a highly favourable comparison
(Pratkanis, 2007).

‘Official Supermarket of Team GB’

The advert ends with the voice-over mentioning Aldi is the 'official supermarket of team GB',
which creates a team like feeling. The result of this is that anyone who is in support of GB,
which of course, most people in the country will be, wants to join in with this and get on the
bandwagon (Pratkanis, 2007).

References

Petty, R., Brinol, P., & Priester, J. (2018). Implications of the elaboration likelihood
model of persuasion. Media Effects: Advances In Theory And Research, 2, 64.
Shakespeare, S. (2018). YouGov | Nothing beats a Nike ad campaign?. YouGov:
What the world thinks. Retrieved 20 March 2018, from https://yougov.co.uk/news
/2018/02/21/nothing-beats-nike-ad-campaign-londoners-it-has-ta/
Tidwell, N., Eastwick, P., & Finkel, E. (2012). Perceived, not actual, similarity
predicts initial attraction in a live romantic context: Evidence from the speed-dating
paradigm. Personal Relationships, 20(2), 199-215. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-
6811.2012.01405.x

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