Following my army presentation we continued our workshops on advertising techniques. This week we focused on COGNITIVE DISSONANCE and its impact on advertising. Paul lectured us on what it is and how it used, he provided us also with a information sheet that explained its use. Below i will note down simplisitically what it is and how its used in today's advertising culture.
COGNITIVE DISSONANCE - " a tendancy to seek consistency among attitudes, thoughts and beliefs "
People's actions, thoughts , and beliefs are known as cognitions. If two cognitions agree with other there is consonance , and a state of comfort is resulting. If two cognitions disagree there is a dissonance, resulting in a state of discomfort. Many people strive to have consistency in their attitudes, thoughts and beliefs.
People alleviate cognitive dissonance in one of three ways;
1. reducing the importance
2. adding consonant cognitions
3. removing changing dissonant cognitions
An example of this could be a advertising campaign that urge's people to show how much you care by buying diamonds seek cognitive dissoance in consumers for example the dissonance between love that people have for others , and the pressure to prove your love by buying these diamonds.
Many others try to use incentives to change the effect of cognitive dissonance, this is done by reducing the dissonace by comments such as " its okay because i dont mind it"
or adding a consonant cognition with comments like " it's okay because i get paid well"
After understanding the idea of coginitive dissonance and its use within advertising, we were instructed to design a ad for either toyota or apple using the cogintive dissonance technique. Both me and tom decided to choose the apple i pod brief to create a sense of cogintive dissonance with the viewer. On my next post i will state our initial ideas etc. ..
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