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Advertising Science Uncovering Why You Buy Marketers have been searching for a “buy button,” the Holy Grail of marketing research, for decades. What, exactly, causes people to hand over their hard-earned money in exchange for a product or service? The answer is worth billions, and its pursuit has spawned countless academic papers and much debate. Washington State University researchers are getting closer to helping marketers understand how one of their biggest expenditures—advertising—affects consumer buying behavior. How do consumers respond to various typefaces used in advertising? What effect do nostalgic ads—ads that remind people of the past—have on people’s perceptions of a product? And how can advertisers reach the skeptics who distrust most things they see in commercials? These are just a few of the questions College of Business professors are answering through their work. Logos, fonts, and their effects Former Professor Pamela Henderson, who taught marketing courses in the College of Business from 1992 to 2006, became intrigued by what causes people to like the look of certain images and dislike the appearance of others when she was in graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder—I don’t believe that,” Henderson says. “I don’t believe it’s that subjective.” She says there are certain principles of design that work for most people, causing people to have common opinions of what is attractive and what isn’t. “That’s why certain artwork is liked more than others,” Henderson says. “If (beauty) truly were in the eye of the beholder, we wouldn’t have museums that a lot of people want to tour.” Henderson has studied the impact of brand logos and typeface design, among other topics. She says many companies—including 14 WSU College of Business
ig-name, national companies that one might assume would know better—don’t always do enough research when creating or redesigning the images that represent them. “Where they sometimes really miss the mark is in their mark, in their logos,” she says. The telecommunications company AT&T, for example, recently changed its highly recognizable, all-capital-letter logo and blue-and-white-striped circle to more informal, thinner, lowercase letters next to a sphere that looks like a bouncing ball. “AT&T has wanted to look like they’re more approachable,” Henderson says. The new logo “is definitely more approachable, but where they fall short is that they don’t know how multidimensional their font is.” That is, the fonts that companies choose in their marketing can convey different messages: confidence, distrust, pleasure, reassurance, strength, coldness, and more. AT&T’s prior font was bold, giving it a feeling of strength and stability, while the new font is thinner and more casual. In April 2005, Henderson published an article in the Harvard Business Review that advises marketers to consider the messages sent—either intentionally or not—by their typeface. Henderson, along with CB professors Joan Giese and Joseph Cote, studied 210 typefaces. Fonts that subjects considered warm, attractive, likable, and feminine include AncientScript, Enviro, and Informal Roman. The downside of using those fonts is that they aren’t especially strong or reassuring. Fonts that might be effective in an edgy marketing campaign because they’re considered interesting, emotional, exciting, and innovative are Chiller, Stonehenge, and Paintbrush. A business trying to convey feelings of assurance and strength, such as a bank, might want to avoid using those fonts since study subjects felt those options were unsettling and unfamiliar, Henderson says. The third group includes Playbill, Onyx, and StencilSet, fonts that were called cold, unattractive, and unemotional by the study subjects. So should marketers avoid those unfriendly typefaces altogether? “These typefaces aren’t useless,” Henderson says in the article. “Companies might, for example, use them to display characteristics or claims of a countercultural or competing brand.” Advertising Scholar Receives Lifetime Achievement Award The article goes on to identify strong, masculine fonts, such as NewYorkDeco and Fisherman; interesting and emotional—yet dishonest—fonts, such as BigDaddy and Ransom; and commonly used fonts that project stability, such as Georgia and Times New Roman. Darrel Muehling, professor and chair of the Department of Marketing, was honored with a lifetime achievement award for outstanding contribution to advertising research from the American Academy of Advertising (AAA) in March. Only 14 people have received this award since the AAA was founded in 1958. The Academy publishes the Journal of Advertising and serves the industry by strengthening advertising research and education. According to the AAA, “Darrel has made major contributions to advertising research over his career, including several best paper awards at leading journals like the Journal of Advertising. Darrel is past president of AAA and has been cited as one of the most frequent contributors to the top journals of our field.” “I have always been interested in why or how advertising works,” says Muehling. He teaches a class on the principles of marketing for juniors, and a senior-level promotions management course that provides a text and case approach to integrating promotion into the marketing plan by examining methods, organization, communications, media selection, and campaigns. After earning his bachelor of science, bachelor of arts, master’s, and doctorate degrees from the University of Nebraska, Muehling joined the WSU marketing faculty in 1985. He became an associate professor with tenure in 1991, and full professor in 1997, the same year he assumed leadership of the department. He has developed courses for distance degree students, was a visiting professor at Thammasat University and Prince of Songkla University in Thailand, and has served on numerous university, college, and industry committees. Dividend 15
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