Shock Appeal in Advertising

1.0 INTRODUCTION

Due to globalization and competitiveness in business, organizations roll out different commercials in other to break through the advertising clutter so as to be noticed by the consumers thereby subjecting them to thousands of adverts on daily basis. As a result, they exceed what is considered ethical and the commercial is considered to be very provocative. This has lead to the aim of this research which is to unravel how consumers perceive provocative advertising when shock appeal is used as a conductor.

According to Pickton and Broderick (2005), they opined that advertising is a form of communication used to influence individuals to purchase products or services, support ideas and pass relevant information or caution across to the targeted audience. In delivering those messages highlighted above, ad agency adopts different appeals that can help them reach large number of the targeted audience without encountering high cost. Such appeals adopted are rational appeals, emotional appeals, sex appeal, fear or anger appeal etc. However, for the course of this research, emphasis will be laid on shock appeals .

1.1 RESEARCH OBJECTIVE

❖ To identify shock commercials strategies and the extent organization use them.

❖To define shock advertising and why organization use them.

❖To identify the relationship between consumer perception of shock commercial. Using gender and age of target audience.

❖To comprehend how ethical perceptions begins and also, to identify what sets of values or core beliefs might the consumer draw upon when contemplating the ethics of controversial practices in advertising today due to provocative appeal.

1.2 RESEARCH QUESTION

❖ The research question will try to explore if shock appeal aids recall and recognition of advert

❖ To identify consumer perceptions of shock advertisements and also to investigate if their is any link between such perception with the age of the consumer or gender.

2.0 REVIEW OF LITERATURE

Shock appeal used to produce shock commercials has been in existence for years, and it certainly aids recall recognition of commercial that it is widely referred as "yobbo" advertising in U.K (Dahl et al., 2003). According to Yeshin (2005), he opined that it is an approach designed to startle the recipient deliberately or offend them in other to make them notice the advertisement. Darl et al (2003) in the other hand, defined it as an advertisement that purposefully offends audience.

The scholar that crystallizes this kind of appeal was Vezina and Paul (1994) which they called provocative advertising. They defined it as those commercials with deliberate appeal, within the content of an advertisement, to stimuli that are expected to shock at least a portion of the audience, both because they are associated with values, norms or taboos that are habitually not challenged or transgressed in advertising, due to their distinctiveness and ambiguity. They advised further that when provocative ads is been adopted, it comprises of several concepts and within these concepts are three main components which are of high importance. They are:

❖ Distinctiveness:

According to Childers and Houston (1984), they are of the opinion that distinctiveness is the uniqueness of any advertisement. If an ad was made based on the success story of the one made previously or imitated, it will loose its effect because the audience might already be tired of that particular type of provocation and imitating it will weaken the effectiveness. Therefore, when adopting provocative appeal like shock, the challenge of the advertiser is to constantly be original, innovative and keep in mind that successful ads are based on distinctiveness.

❖ Ambiguity:

Distinctiveness mentioned above cannot work in isolation to trigger provocation in advert ( Vezina and Paul, 1994). Another factor that helps to create provocativeness is the ability to provide rooms for distinct interpretation if not for the content of the ad, but for the intention of the advertiser. The reason why most advertiser adopt this strategy is because it has the potential to elevate the provocative dimension of the commercial that is provocative in nature and the basic principle behind this deliberate ambiguity is because a provocative message that lack ambiguity is more likely to be dismissed immediately by the audience who are shocked and as a result of this, discard it since it will not be processed by them.

❖ Transgression of Norms and Taboos:

When something thats is ascribed by the audience as taboo is used in an ad, provocation is more likely to occur. Commercials that contain the above two concepts are not likely to shock consumers unless it contains transgression of norms and taboos ( Vezina and Paul 1994). They stated that lately, researchers are very interested on this concept because of its inherent effect on conveying the message. Furthermore, they argues that standards of public decency have changed from past decade till date and one of the elements that contributed to that is advertising which is why it is common to find researches discussing issues about ethics in advertising and decency in advertising. Conversely, one can say that changing social norms have probably affected advertising practices also.

In addition, they explain that provocation is elicited through the process of norm violation, encompassing transgressions of law or custom (i.e obscenity, indecent sexual references), things that outrage the moral or physical senses (disgusting images, gratuitous violence) or breaches moral or social code (i.e profanity, vulgarity ). Norm violation is the violation shared expectations within a social group, of their rules and regulation guiding them which define what is acceptable and what is not acceptable (Baron and Byrne, 1997).

Shock advertising breaches all this norms that are in place within a particular social group.

It is against this backdrop that one can categorically say that shock appeal significantly uses surprise as part of the process because it initializes the commercial information processing which consumers are surprise to be aired in T.V as an ad, or seeing in billboards without the regulatory authority banning it. Though, some companies prefer controversial ads because it sells. For instance, what made Sony Play station 3 popular is because of their advert which put all Nigerians as scammers.