The Effect of Advertisement on Consumer Behavior

At times, business owners and marketers produce ads without considering the consumer's behavior toward these advertisements.

Knowing their behavior after seeing an advertisement helps you understand more about your consumers. With their response, you can create more relevant ads that trigger them to buy or be interested in your brand.

What Is Consumer Behavior in Advertising?

Consumer behavior is how a customer engages with your brand while deciding to buy or already conducting the buying action. How they react or feel and what they do after seeing an ad constitutes consumer behavior.

While various consumer demographics react differently to ads, their behavior towards the brand after seeing the ad is more or less the same. It largely depends on the format, messaging, and branding that a business incorporates in the ad. It's crucial to understand the buying behavior of consumers. Their behavior provides you with a direction in creating ads.

How Ads Affect Consumer Behavior

Advertisements create an impact on the consumers as you present your products and services. When they come across your marketing materials, it stirs them up depending on the message or format you use. Here are some of what consumers usually feel or do after seeing an ad.

Entertain Consumers

While the primary goal of ads is to inform the public about your brand, they also entertain the audience, depending on how clever your presentation is. They make audiences get hooked on what you put out there, just like what movies and TV series do. TV commercials either make the audience laugh or be emotional, blending in with the entertainment value of the shows on TV. 

The same is true for online ads, which the netizens can mistake for them not being an ad due to how entertaining they are. Some ads even go viral because they entertain the viewers. If they find your ads very amusing to watch, they will share the ad.

60% of respondents from a Statista survey perceive TV ads as the most entertaining form of advertisement. Internet ads, except for social media, are the least enjoyable. Only 38% of those surveyed find them pleasing. This goes to show that ads, when done right, entertain consumers despite them knowing that the brand is merely doing it to promote their product.

Brand Familiarity

Continuous exposure through ads helps consumers be more familiar with a brand. A consumer will recognize a brand usually from the ad that they have seen. Unknown brands can compete against more established competitors with ads that help reach their target consumers.

Meanwhile, existing brands continuously put out ads to make their brand relevant to their consumers. Once a consumer sees an ad, they'll associate it with a brand. This will spark their curiosity about the product or service that the brand can offer to them.

The search engine company Google made a joint test with Ipsos MediaCT to see if search ads contribute to brand awareness. In a pool of 800 U.S. consumers, 14.8% connected a test brand with a specific keyword after seeing the ad. Only 8.2% of those without exposure to the search ad were able to recall the brand. The difference between the two groups shows that the search ads created an average 80% increase in top-of-mind awareness for a brand.

Build Trust and Confidence

An advertisement can persuade people to try their product. It can boost their confidence that the product or service will solve their pain points. New products that have yet to prove their worth from consumers use ads to establish trust from their buyers. Some ads also bring back consumer confidence in their brand when they feature new product offerings or variants. Pharmaceutical software solutions are increasingly turning to advanced software solutions to optimize their advertising strategies and better understand consumer behavior.

Other ads feature testimonials from consumers to build more trust in their brand. It's a widespread practice among medical products such as advertisements for medicine. Pharmaceutical firms need to convince consumers about the effectiveness of their products. Hence, the need for testimonial ads.

Nielsen surveyed global consumers and found out that 66% of them trust ads coming from consumer reviews. The same trust percentage comes with editorial ads, like those appearing in newspaper articles. As for the ad formats, traditional advertising earns more trust than online ads. 63% of respondents trust TV commercials, while only 48% believe in online video ads.

Social Perception

The reason why most businesses hire a famous endorser is because of the corresponding social imaging. Ads that feature a celebrity make consumers relate with the well-known personality's status.

Making a product a status symbol is due to the ads that consumers see. It makes them follow the current trend, all the more when a famous individual endorses the brand. The associated social imaging persuades the consumers to want the product that the celebrity advertises.

Research from the Wisconsin School of Business cited how print ads overrepresent the middle and upper-class demographics, which results in a misleading perception of lower-income consumers belonging to the same socio-economic class. Additionally, 16% of Internet users were able to discover a brand through a celebrity. And these celebrity-endorsed ads are worth the hefty investment - it leads to an average of 4% sales increase.

Affect Their Mood

Consumers have various reactions to ads in different formats, mediums, and messages. Depending on the emotions on display, it can either affect them positively or negatively.

Ads that incorporate humor or light-hearted presentation make the consumers feel positive about a brand. On the other hand, some ads may impact consumers negatively when it includes sensitive issues such as racism, political beliefs, and the like. They will typically connect their emotions and opinion with the brand producing the ad.

In an infographic from the University of Southern California, 31% of advertising campaigns with emotional content performed well. This is almost half of the only 16% of successful campaigns with rational content. The data from the school's Applied Psychology department cites the emotion of "likeability" in an ad as the main factor that contributes to a brand's increase in sales.

Clearly Define the Product Benefits

Complicated products or services which are still new to the market provide ads that explain the benefits of what they're offering. For instance, startups whose products solve a specific problem have ads that clarify how their product can simplify a complex process. Advertisements translate how a product will benefit its consumers into more simple terms. 

Instead of lengthy videos, a short and simple presentation about the product's features help consumers understand the benefits it can provide to them. They make it easy for consumers to figure out how a product or service will address the problems they're facing. Or you could make a short video with subtitles which will describe the main points about your product.

For consumers of food products, 67% of them want to know what goes into the food they buy. Parents research a product before buying. And 68% of these parents say they wished ads help them learn something new to get the best experience out of their purchase.

Motivate Them To Buy

Businesses create ads to persuade more consumers to buy their products. They invest in expensive advertisements to spark the interest of potential consumers to go to the nearest store and buy what they offer.

Limited promotions such as discounts and sales enhance the consumer's interest to buy. They want to take advantage of the limited time that a product is available for a lesser price tag. Also, ads emphasizing how they solve a consumer's problem entices them to see it for themselves if it's worth trying.

After seeing an Internet ad, 44% of U.S. consumers say they purchased a product, according to a Statista finding. When it comes to traditional out-of-home ads, 60% are more likely to buy a product after seeing an ad during a consumer's regular shopping trip.

Risk of Advertising Fatigue

While ads are a great way to expose a brand, there's also the risk of negatively affecting the consumers. The viewers of an ad may find ads annoying, especially when it wasn't even entertaining in the first place. This is widespread across online advertising platforms where consumers continuously see ads not interesting to them. Some would even go as far as downloading ad blockers to minimize showing online ads.

This kind of experience happens with ads that are dull or repetitive. If it does not spark any other emotion from a consumer aside from merely letting them know about a product, they are more likely to experience fatigue. Thus, some brands update their ads to make them relevant and captivating for their target demographics.

Banner blindness, a term used to indicate when users ignore banner ads on the Internet, is a challenge among marketers. Goo Technologies surveyed 2,000 American consumers and found out that, aside from online ads, they also ignore other types of ad formats:

• Online – 82%
• Television – 37%
• Radio – 36%
• Newspaper – 35%

The rate at which people ignore ads means that you need to be mindful of how you craft your ads. It helps to be more intentional than reacting to an unsuccessful campaign. To implement a successful ad campaign, match the consumer behaviors with how you want consumers to feel or respond to your ads.