Psychology Advertisement: How does advertising influence what people buy?

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Advertising is to convince people to buy products that fit within a person's taste and preferences. However, how can you convince someone to buy your own product even though your product is most likely not their favorite? There are some techniques that advertisers use to make their advertisement more appealing. Here are some strategies.

According to an article called "Advertising Psychology", advertisements come in three components. They all have a brand/logo, an image, and a set of text but how they are positioned and used can be appealing to someone that is watching advertising in television. Some examples about putting text and images and brands/logos at certain areas such as putting images and graphics to the left side of the screen.

To be more scientific about the matter, your left side of your brain processes text while your right side processes the image that is on the advertisement. Your left side of your brain goes to your right eye, which is why the text is on the left side, and your right side of your brain goes to the left side, which is why the image is on the left side. That is called the opposing hemisphere.

Source: nikolenda.com

The reason why that the texts are arranged the way they are in the advertisement is because that people could also have the ability to digest the advertisement a lot easier compared to having to put the text on the left side and the image on the right side. The most interesting fact that I found in "Advertising Psychology" is that "The left one is more logical and verbal, placing the image on the left hand side of the text enhances the processing of the whole message."

There are many tactics that a lot of advertisers use to convince people that their product is good so I will only be naming few by few for each post. The second way that advertisement use to appeal to other people about their product in advertisement is that the depiction of something encourages mental interaction towards, in this case, an object. According to "Advertising Psychology", using this tactic is very powerful, easy to implement, and is not used very widely in the business world. This is very interesting to me because if this was very easy to use and very easy to put in a advertisement, why didn't any business person use this tactic? It seems pretty useful to me when you try to make your products appealing. 

The example for depiction of mental encourage interaction is how the mug is placed on a white table with a white, or green screen, background. In the picture of the article, there is a link above if you want to see, there is a picture of how a mug should be placed and how the mug shouldn't be placed. The first mug has it's handle to the right side, which is very uncomfortable to see, and the second has the handle of the left side, which felt just right. 

Source: nikolenda.com

The last tactic that I am going to mention for this blog post is Oriental model's gaze towards your CTA. CTA stands for call to action and Oriental model means a person, in the advertisement, gazing towards a certain thing. This tactic is used for people, who are watching the advertisement, to follow the person's gaze towards the important text to help them read whatever is on the advertisement. According to the nikolenda article, Advertising Psychology, it says on the third heading that humans have the tendency to follow other people's gazes therefore it has become one of the tactics to attract people's attention. It also says that if the person on the advertisement is looking straight at you, in a frontal perspective, you would look at the model and not at the text that is written on the advertisement.

Source: nikolenda.com

There are more types of tactics that other people use to influence people to buy their own products. These are the first three types of tactics that either were used a lot or weren't used that often. The next blog post would have three more types of tactics for other people to use.