Usachev V.A., Sokol I.L.

Donetsk national university of economics and trade named after Mikhailo Tugan-Baranovsky

Theory of Cognitive Dissonance

and Fear Appeals in Advertising

Advertising deals with people's feelings and emotions. It includes understanding of the psychology of the buyer, his motives, attitudes, as well as the influences on him such as his family and reference groups, social class and culture. In order to increase the advertisements persuasiveness, advertisers use many types of extensions of behavioral sciences to marketing and buying behavior. One such extension is the theory of cognitive dissonance. The purpose of advertising is to create a cognitive dissonance to generate a favorable response from the buyer toward a product or a concept.

The purpose of advertising is simply to sell a product or a service. In social contexts ads have many other applications such as reducing accidents, increasing voting and reducing smoking which must be assessed instead of profit. However people do not automatically buy a product after they are exposed to an ad. First, they have thoughts or feelings about a product, and then they buy it. Advertising and other types of marketing communications directly affect consumer's mental processes. Advertising can be thought of as stimulus that produces a response or an effect. Moreover, the main objective of advertisements is to convince consumers that the alternative offered by the product provides the best chance to attain the goal.
The attitude toward the advertisement is defined "as a predisposition to respond in favorable or unfavorable manner to a particular advertising stimulus during a particular exposure occasion ". The range of feelings generated by advertisements is broad and spreads from contentment to repulsion. Those feelings can have a direct impact on brand attitudes.

It is really important for advertisers to generate a feeling that will modify the buyer's attitude toward a product. One of the strategies used by advertisers is to create a cognitive dissonance in people's mind.

Effecting change in behavior through persuasion is the method through which advertising is carried out. There are many ways in which persuasion can be done. One of them is by using Festinger’s Cognitive Dissonance Theory. This theory is based on the assumption that people desire to have internal psychological consistency of their cognitions in the form of beliefs and attitudes.  When these beliefs and attitudes are attacked, cognitive dissonance or disharmony takes place. As this is an uncomfortable feeling, people generally want to avoid cognitive inconsistency.

When there is a discrepancy between beliefs and behaviors, something must change in order to eliminate or reduce the dissonance. For instance, a product that one has been using for a long time is reported to have some serious issues. The report causes anxiety and cognitive dissonance. To avoid it, the person can effect a change in his behavior: either give up using the product or try to disregard the report and focus on the other qualities of the product and continue using it, thereby reducing the dissonance between the two cognitive elements that are inconsistent with each other. Cognitive dissonance can be reduced by altering the relative proportions of the elements or by modifying their importance.

Fear appeal billboards with bloody images of accidents caused due to drunken driving cause a dissonance between their cognition that they are driving after drinking and their cognition that drunken driving causes fatal car accidents. This state is uncomfortable because they know that their drinking and driving behavior is causing problems and that they should stop drunken driving in order to remove the dissonance.

Advertising makes use of fear appeals to achieve an effective cognitive dissonance situation. Fear appeals are advertising messages that try to generate anxiety in the targeted audiences to adopt an endorsed response to the threat.

Fear appeal ads have long been used for persuading the audience against issues that are harmful in the social, health and environment areas, like smoking, drinking, drugs, AIDS, deforestation, pollution. There are three types of fear appeals based on the intensity of fear they produce in the viewer: high intensity, low intensity and medium intensity. A lot of research has been conducted on the most suitable method of using fear appeals to persuade change in behavior. It has been found that fear appeal ads are capable of persuading only up to a certain level above which it becomes ineffective as demonstrated by the curvilinear model of fear appeal ads.

For instance, people watching anti-smoking ads experience varying amounts of fear and disgust and instigated the recognition memory and emotional responses. The higher the fear appeal, the more unpleasantness was felt. Some researchers such as Hastings, Stead, & Webb, (2004) observed that viewers such as smokers become habituated to repetitive fear appeal warnings and are likely to downgrade the threats because repetition causes annoyance and not fear.