Consumer Behaviour Theory & Advertisement

Consumer Behaviour

Introduction

Advertising is a major mode of communication from retailers or service providers towards their customers to present their ideas and to deliver information. According to Wikipedia (2011), in 2010, spending on advertising was estimated at more than $300 billion in the United States and $500 billion worldwide. Powerful and effective advertising is needed to increase the demand for products or services within reasonable budgets.

This essay first discusses consumer behaviour theory and consumer influences by analyzing the content of the advertisement by Air New Zealand (NZ), which appears on The Press, Christchurch. Its potential target group and customers is then specified. It then moves on to point out the specific objective(s) of the advertisement with evaluation of such achievement and its effectiveness. Finally, some potential changes to enhance the entire advertisement are indicated.

Consumer Behaviour Theory & Advertisement

According to Schiffman and Kanuk (1995), consumer behaviour is "the study of how individuals make decisions to spend their available resources on consumption". Consumer influences affect consumer behaviour and drive marketing decision (Pettigrew & Hawkins 2011). Advertising is classified as a type of promotion within the marketing mix and is a type of marketing decision. This is the reason why advertisers choose different advertising strategies towards different target consumer groups.

Aviation industry boomed since 1990s. Flying has become a common way of travelling and it became cheaper to fly globally than before. As a result, there are more competitors in the market. For many airlines, one of the skills to survive in this competitive aviation industry is to advertise critically and strategically. This essay focuses on the advertisement made by Air NZ from The Press, Christchurch on 26th Jan 2011 shown in Appendix 1. Graph 1 and 2 give clear view to the title and the overall design.

First of all, the most noticeable thing for readers is that the advertisement is placed on the main page (page A19) with a central big title and the airline logo at the bottom right corner. The content also accompanies with the website for online booking. Readers can easily acknowledge that this is an advertisement made by Air NZ. The size of the advertisement is about a quarter of the entire page. It also shows a list of "low" prices tickets to different destinations.

The title 'Super Low Domestic Fares' aims to give readers an impression of the cheapness of their air tickets to various destinations. Therefore, its main targets are those who have high elasticity of demand for air tickets to fly domestically as their responsiveness to price are sensitive. They may be attracted to fly instead of taking other transportations.

Objectives and Attempts

The advertisement serves two explicit objectives. Firstly, it approaches consumer with situational influences or more specifically as time influence. The other objective is to enhance the perceptual process for consumers.

Situational Influences are the "temporary conditions or settings that occur in the environment at a specific time and place." (Assael et al. 2008). It implies that consumer would choose to buy the product immediately once they saw the advertisement. The phenomenon is due to a limited time available for shopping or as a result of seasonal product. Air NZ attempts to offer the sales of cheap ticket for 24 hours only to shorten the time of decision-making by customers.

Perception is the process through which consumers select stimuli and attend, organize and interpret information. Consumers