Use of Social Appeal in advertising in Marketing Communications
 
Ankur Jauhari1*, Dr. Sunayana Shukla2
1 PhD Student, Kalinga University, Raipur (CG).
2 PhD Guide, Dept. of Commerce & Management, Kalinga University, Raipur (CG)
Abstract - The term "social appeal of advertising" describes a very new and exciting idea in the advertising industry. This kind of advertising appeals to the audience on a deeper level by positioning the brand in relation to a social cause and encouraging them to take action in support of that cause. It is "an integrated advertising technique that requires amalgamation of features of brand advertising with that of social marketing" as stated in the advertising concept of social appeal. The idea of advertising is growing in popularity, and along with it, the need for research. into this method. Additional drivers of this field's study requirement include the media industry's rapid expansion and companies' growing interest in CSR.
Keywords - Consumer Attitudes; And Purchase Intentions; Persuasive Power.
INTRODUCTION
Ads are messages with the express purpose of getting people to buy or do something with a certain product, service, or concept. In order to convince a certain demographic to buy or consume a certain brand, it contains what the service or product is called and how the client may profit from using it. That which promotes "any paid form of non-personal presentation of ideas, goods, and services by an identified sponsor" is known as advertising. Due to its impersonal character, advertising uses mass communication channels to reach a wide audience all at once. This also implies that you won't be able to get prompt responses. This means that marketers need to think carefully about how their target audience will react to their messages.
Defines advertising as "the practice of drawing the general public's attention to a product or service by means of sponsored public service announcements in mass media such as newspapers, television, radio, or the Internet." The fundamental communication instrument that advertising is, say Lane and Russel (1996), is a potential medium for the dissemination of political, social, and economic agendas progress, and philanthropic purposes. As a disposable component of our social, cultural, and commercial milieu, it reflects these contexts by revealing nuanced shifts in public behavior. advertising is a kind of paid, mediated communication that comes from a known source and aims to convince the listener to do something, either immediately or later on. In their 2004 definition of advertising, Czinkota and Ronkainen state that it encompasses the non-personal promotion of ideas, commodities, and services via promotional media.
Advertising plays an essential role in the intricate economic system that provides customers with the diverse range of things they love. Advertising has an influence over time, which is the main idea behind this concept. As a customer goes through the stages of being oblivious, then to knowledge, then to liking, then to preference, then to conviction, and eventually to buy, advertising does not cause an instant behavioral reaction or purchase. If consumers aren't familiar with the brand, the role of the marketer, in this approach, is to introduce them via repetitive product name-related messaging. After consumers mentally file the brand away, the next stage is to educate them about the brand by giving them all the information they need. Once clients have all the knowledge they need about the brand, the next step is to make them like the marketed brand. Most advertisements include well-known individuals in an attempt to sway consumers' opinions. The next stage for marketers is to increase brand preference by drawing comparisons to competing brands. Because even if consumers love the brand, there's no guarantee they'll purchase it, this is done.
Conviction building and encouraging brand purchasing is the next stage. The underlying premise of this concept was that people would react to information in a certain order: cognitive, emotional, and conative. Though most scholars believe that each of the three levels—cognition, emotion, and conation—is crucial, they vary sharply on the relative significance of each (Barry and Howard, 1990). As consumers engage with a variety of brands and see ads for many products in a given category, this model fails to account for the cumulative impact of these ads or the hierarchical nature of competition.
Thirdly, in 1969, William J. McGuire devised the "Information Processing Model" to explain the impacts of advertising. In situations where persuasive communication is required, such as advertising, this model presupposes that the listener is capable of processing information or solving problems. McGuire proposed a reaction hierarchy that consumers go through before they give in to advertising messages.
"The responsibility of enterprises" is how the European Commission (2011) describes CSR. With the development and expansion of markets, businesses now have a larger responsibility and accountability towards the environment, the government, and society as a whole, in addition to their original core responsibility of providing goods and services to consumers and making a profit for entrepreneurs. It is the duty of companies to ensure that their operations take into account social, environmental, ethical, consumer, and human rights concerns. Researchers have found a clear correlation between the academic and commercial communities' focus on CSR in recent decades. Social responsibility (CSR) groups and projects are mushrooming in developing nations including Brazil, India, China, and South Africa.
A more formal framework for corporate social responsibility (CSR) in India is currently being worked on. Corporate social responsibility is now a legal obligation for enterprises with profits of Rs. 5 crore or more, since the enterprises Act, 2013 demands 2% profit allocation for social initiatives. To bring India's economic growth in line with sustainable development, the government has recently mandated that big firms boost their expenditure on healthcare, education, vocational training, healthcare, women's empowerment, social business, and environmental sustainability. Any business that isn't keen on doing good deeds for society may always donate to relief and social development initiatives run by the government. However, there are claims that the law will only apply to 1% of Indian enterprises. But when you convert the figures to rupees, the required cash come out to around $2 billion to $2.4 billion. The required CSR contributions constitute a significant 25% of the total, as compared to the anticipated $8 billion spent in impact investment worldwide in 2012. This money has the potential to make a huge difference (yourstory.com). There has to be more focus on the social appeal of advertising as rising CSR spending opens the door for more spending on brand ads with social themes.
LITERATURE AND REVIEW
Bamoriya, H and Singh, R. (2011) designed to examine how Indian consumers feel about advertisements and how they go about finding out more information. Attitudes toward advertising were favorably correlated with product information, hedonic, social image, and beneficial for economy constructs, and negatively correlated with falsehood and materialism. According to the findings, those who actively seek out information tend to see advertisements in a more positive light than those who do not.
Barnes and Michael (2012) reviewed in detail the studies conducted on British citizens' views on advertisements from 1961 to 1981. Over the course of the twenty years covered by the survey, public opinion on advertising went through regular ups and downs. The public continues to have a positive view of advertising, even though they are subjected to a deluge of commercials on a daily basis across several platforms. Although there was no variation in attitudes towards advertising across demographic categories, the public's acceptance of advertising was influenced by age. On the one hand, young people have the most positive opinions about advertising, while on the other, the old (mostly retirees) have far more unfavorable sentiments than the typical person.
According to research by Bector, Sharma, and Dubey (2014), customers in Haryana generally view advertisements favorably. A customer's opinion toward advertising in Haryana did not vary considerably by demographic variables such as age, gender, education level, income bracket, profession, etc., according to the study.
Lutz, R. J. (2015) explored the potential effects of numerous attribute models on attitude change by making an effort to prove a correlation between shifts in brand attitude and changes in cognitive structure. According to his theory, consumers' attitudes about a brand fluctuate in response to changes in their beliefs about the brand's attributes. Additionally, as people's opinions about a brand's attributes alter, it shows in how they feel about utilizing the brand. The results corroborate those of earlier studies that used the attitude towards behavior paradigm.
An influential study by Lutz, R. J., A study by MacKenzie, S. B., and Belch, G. E. (2013) called "Attitude toward the ad as a mediator of advertising effectiveness: determinants and consequences" put up the idea that one of the five factors that influence perceptions of ads is a learned predisposition to respond consistently favorably or unfavorably to advertisements in general. Credibility of the ad, audience perceptions and thoughts about the ad, audience attitude toward the advertiser, and audience "mood" upon exposure were the last four antecedents of attitude toward advertising. This essay laid the groundwork for future studies on public opinion on advertising.
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
The main goal is to choose the best approach for the necessary research. This study made use of both primary and secondary sources of information. When the population is larger than 20,000, the sample size remains mostly constant, however it does vary with the population size.
This study used a 500-person sample size. Since the data was obtained by self-administered questionnaires in the presence of an enumerator, no instances were eliminated due to missing values or outliers. Table 1 displays the total number of participants broken down by type.
Table 1. Sample size for each group
Data screening and analysis technique selection are covered in this section. The primary analytic software package used in the research was SPSS.
Table 2. Characteristic 1(a): The Endearing Nature of Ads
Figure 1. Characteristic 1(a): The Endearing Nature of Ads
Figure 1. displays the respondent's response, illustrating the social attraction of advertising. Here we can see the information from table 2 represented graphically. The data reveals that over half of the people who took the survey support these kinds of advertisements.
Table 3. Primarily, the advertisement appeals to consumers' emotions.
Figure 2. Primarily, the advertisement appeals to consumers' emotions.
Figure 2. shows the percentage of respondents who answered question 1(a) about the emotional appeal of advertising, which is explained in Table 3. Most people who took the survey don't have strong opinions on the advertising campaign.
As demonstrated in Table 4, the two types of advertising appeals had similar averages and standard deviations for attribute 1 (a).
Table 4. Attribute 1's mean score and standard deviation
According to table 4, the respondents lean somewhat more towards social appeal than emotional appeal.
For both groups of advertising appeals, the quantile of respondents' choices for the characteristic "1(b)".
 
Table 5. One social aspect of advertising is its attractiveness.
Figure 3. One social aspect of advertising is its attractiveness.
See how the respondent felt about the social appeal of ads in Figure 3. The image depicts the data from table 5. The majority of respondents (71.2%), as seen in the figure, think these kinds of advertising initiatives are great.
Table 6. One (b) quality of ads is their ability to capture consumers' emotions.
Figure 4. One (b) quality of ads is their ability to capture consumers' emotions.
Response to the question based on the respondent's view of the persuasive power of ads on an emotional level 1(b) is shown above in Figure 4.8. The percentages represent the replies. From the data shown in the figure, it is clear that people have mixed feelings about ads that appeal to their emotions; forty percent of people are positive about these ads, while forty percent are indifferent.
Attribute 1 (b) mean scores and standard deviations for the two ad appeal styles Table 6 displays the results.
Table 7. Attribute 1's mean score and standard deviation
Table 8. shows that people are more receptive to advertisements that speak to their social conscience rather than their emotions.
For both sets of advertising appeals, as previously mentioned, Tables 7 and 8 illustrate the frequency distribution of the responder choices on the attribute "1(c)".
Table 8. Attribute 1(c): The advertisement's societal appeal
Figure 5. Attribute 1(c): The advertisement's societal appeal
Figure 5. shows the proportion of respondents who saw the social appeal of advertising as positive, which is the position held by the majority of respondents.
Table 9. Feature 1(c): The persuasive power of ads
Figure 6. Feature 1(c): The persuasive power of ads
Figure 6 is a graphic depiction of table 9, which reveals that the majority of respondents see emotionally attractive commercials as either having mixed feelings or being doubtful of their effectiveness.
For both types of advertising appeals, Table 9. shows the mean and standard deviation of characteristic 1 (c).
Table 10. Aspect 1's mean score and standard deviation (c)
According to table 10, the findings reveal that people look at ads with social appeals and think they're better than ads with emotional appeals.
For both groups of advertising appeals, the distribution of respondent choices on the attribute "1(d)".
Table 11. Feature 1(d): The advertisement's societal attractiveness
Figure 7. Feature 1(d): The advertisement's societal attractiveness
Table 11. Shows the percentage of people that reacted to social appeal ads based on trait 1(d), and Figure 7. Provides that visual representation. This form of advertising was deemed attractive by the great majority of poll takers.
CONCLUSION
Consumers' conviction this study found that people's attitudes and behaviors towards relevant social concerns are favorably influenced by social appeal advertising. The primary goal of socially attractive advertising is to convey and convince customers for a social cause, hence it is important to study how this sort of advertising influences customer attitude towards associated social reasons. via a brand connection.
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