Second Advertising Fundamental: Dominant Mood.
It can come as no surprise, that the importance of one unified impression fundamental sets the stage for the rest of the fundamentals that Schwerin and Newell points to in their research. And yes, the fundamentals are derived from research into more than 50.000 ads and TV-commercials. So these fundamentals then are much more than one man’s (or rather two men’s) grand tale of what works, and don’t work, in advertising. Make no mistake here. These research results sticks to efficient communication. Not as a bible, but as a kind of default setting for persuasion. You can always go against these rules of persuasion, but I would consider that as risky business.
In this research, Schwerin and Newell found that there was yet another a common denominator for successful persuasion in marketing.. Successful campaigns fall in one of two opposite poles of persuasion: they are either emotional or logical in their “argument”.
What does this mean?
Sometimes the easiest way to explain a thing is telling a story of what it is not. The argument here does not imply that you need to rid every emotional element from a logical advertisement. That is hardly possible. And, it does not imply that you need to get rid of all logical hints in an overall emotional advertisement. This is hardly possible either.
The lesson to be learned seems to be that you need to pick your main road; either logical or emotional. And you need to stay on that road as best you can. That can sometimes take some effort. You need to know what means you have to your disposal for staying on the road. These means could easily be some you find in the barebones toolbox. For instance, it will help you a lot if you are aware of the difference between denotation and connotation, when you draft you concept and later on, the specific layout for the e.g. print ad. You can use gestalt factors to hold things together (text and main visuals).
When you chose your main road you should chose one of the two options mentioned; emotional or logical. Do that, and you chose a dominant mood for your persuasion. And advertising is about persuasion of people.
Let’s be more specific.
I need your help in imagining the following picture (sorry I do not have one in the real). I need you to imagine a white refrigerator. About 1.80 meter tall, and 0.60 meter wide. Doors open so you can see the empty shelves. (It is a brand new refrigerator. Just unpacked).
Do you manage this? Are you able to smell it as well, and sense the depth of it? (You will be amazed of how many people, that will not be able to imagine such a simple scene, but I bargain that you are not one of them. So, I continue).
Here, then, you have this imaginary brand new and very white refrigerator, right? Next step: Now you will image a newspaper and reading it a Sunday morning. On the third page is a picture of that same refrigerator, that you have just imagined. The text that sits above of the picture reads like this: “Be there Sunday before 01.00 p.m, and you get this Siemens for half the price“. The text body goes on telling you about the size of the refrigerator, how good it is to cool your wine, milk and groceries, how cold it freezes, that you don’t have to de-ice it ever, and that it, in terms of energy, will help the polar bears to stay on the North Pole in stead of in the North Pole Zoo.
Such an advertisement, may indeed raise you emotions, but in terms of dominant mood it is riding the logical main road. You build up an argument, and you stay with that argument. The main string in such an argument could be size, price or polar bears. Or it could be something else. It am sure that you get it 
Now to the emotional advertisements, and the second of the two main road available within the scope of dominant moods. Let me see if I can find a suitable picture so that this post will not end up consisting of text only (people don’t read much nowadays). And this post has already too many words.
Here is a suitable picture. Let’s look at it. You look at it.
So, what have we got?
For sure, this is not then the inside or the outside of a refrigerator, as in our imagination above. No, this is a picture of two deck chairs in front of a Bacardi poster. Shot on board one of the large ferries taking people and cars from Copenhagen, Denmark to Oslo, Norway. Shot, as I recall, in 2006.
Now, to the next little experiment. Forget the refrigerator, and in your imagination place this picture over the whole page in the same Sunday paper, that you “had in your hands” a while ago. Add the following headline to it: Free Drinks.
Having this image in you mind, would you say that this was a dominant mood of what: logic or emotion. Would you be travelling on the emotional road or the logical road. What do I hear you say? Do I hear you at all … no, I don’t so I will have to speak once more
You could, of course, say that the heading “free drinks” could be a part of a logical argument. For instance “free drinks and you will save money”, which most of us will understand as a reasonable argument. But in this context, I would argue that this imaginary advertisement is dominantly emotional. How do I come to that conclusion. Well, why not use the connotations that might come with this picture. Here are some suggestions: relaxation, vacation, travel, sunshine, good feeling, et cetera.
And that is nearly all I have to say this time. Sorry for such a wordy post. YOU need to continue from here
Very quick summary. Dominant mode is one of the advertising fundamentals stressed by Schwerin and Newell in their research. You are better off if you chose one road, logic or emotion, in stead of trying to travel both at the same time.
You should notice, that research in advertising goes very well with more academic sources like semiology, gestalt psychology and with phenomenology, even if all these sources have not been made explicit in this post.
Basically, the idea of merging resources are what barebones communication is all about: How different sources of competence may work together. They can even do so in very practical situations. Like, for instance, analysing or “constructing” a piece of communication like “an advertisement”.
If you want to read the first post in this barebones section on advertising, please go here. For an overview go here.
Other posts
You’ll find direct links to the other posts in this series on advertising fundamentals, below. If the post title is linked, it means that the posts has been submitted, and that you will get to it if you follow the link. If the fundamental is not yet linked, it means that that the post is not there yet. So you need to have a little patience.
First Fundamental: One Unified Impression.
Second Fundamental: Dominant Mood.
Third Fundamental: Visual and Verbal.
Fourth Fundamental: The Simple Truth.
Fifth Fundamental: Product of Consumer.
Sixth Fundamental: The Right Consumer.
Seventh Fundamental: Thoughts Worth Entertaining.
If you want to go for the book making your learning curve steeper and faster, here is the Library Thing information on it. And you’ll get the full information here as well: Persuasion in Marketing, The Dynamics of Marketing’s Great Untapped Resource, John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1981.
Stay well. A post on the third fundamental will emerge on this blog soon.
First Advertising Fundamental: One Unified Impression.
Once again time to move on. Let me point a few posts back on the blog. Back to this post about fundamentals in persuasive advertising. You should really start by reading, or re-reading, that post.
The next about 10 posts on this blog will refer to that initial post, and more generally to the book Persuasion in Marketing written many years ago by Horace S. Schwerin and Henry H. Newell. Don’t for one moment think that this is outdated information even if the book was written in 1981, and nowadays only can be had as used and well read copies.
I have to say though, that in spite of the actuality of these fundamentals many of them seems to have been forgotten, even by people in the advertising business. I say this being the reader of newspapers and magazines. And the viewer of television. It is amazing what people, and ad agencies, get away with in terms of bad communication in advertising.
So let this post then, and the ones to come, be a reminder to the some advertising people that things can be improved. And a reminder to those paying for it, that much, much money could be invested much, much better by (among other things) observing some very simple, but well proven fundamentals.
One unified impression. What does it mean and how should it be understood? And how can you use it as an operative tool to improve your message? Please note that these fundamentals do not only have bearing on advertising, but on communication in general, if impact is what you are after.
Schwerin and Newell: “The successful advertisement leaves the reader or viewer with a single unified impression. This does not mean that several related concepts cannot be fused together to make a harmonious whole. It does mean that presenting a series of unconnected ideas should be avoided”.
It is not more problematic than that. Let me illustrate this with yet another photograph.
Copyright 2008: Knut Skjærven. All rights reserved.
This photographic message is by no means a simple or uncomplicated one. Look alone at the number of different elements that goes into it. Let me mention the most obvious; three people of different race and colour, a large mask, balloons, decorative items of different shape and content. Many reasons to possibly get confused here, but you don’t do you?
I say, that in terms of one unified impression this image does the job. And it does it pretty well The reason is that none of the elements in it contradict or disturb each other. There are no elements in this pictures that takes you off track, initiates your mind to wanders off in a direction not wanted. Hopefully you agree with me in this. If not, please let me hear from you in a comment to the post and we’ll take the discussion there.
Even if the picture mainly is here to illustrate one unified impression, can other things be said about it? Things that have a bearing on communication in general? I think so. Notice the denotations and connotations that comes with it. Some of the denotative elements have already been mentioned, three people, mask, balloons, different decorative objects to wear on your body.
What about connotations? How would you describe them? Is Roland Barthes at work here as well with one, or more, of this connotation procedures? I think so. I would say that what Barthes says about pose fits this picture well. See this post. You judge it. I could go one. Take a look at how gestalt factors work in this picture: proximity, similarity (or lack of it), closure, good curve, et cetera.
Here are some of the connotations that the image brings with it: happiness, movement, excitement, movement, joy. There are many, many more. The point is that they all forward the same unified message. The same unified impression.
Normally you have text in advertising, as well. Not only pictures. What then about the text? How should the text then work to enhance the message? The art of the copywriter is to fall in, or to direct, the one unified impression. Schwerin and Newell: “Once you have settled on the promise, every idea in the message should reinforce and amplify it”.
Just to make this even clearer: We are talking about ONE single impression here, not one and a half, not two, not three. I am sorry to say, that this amount is what the average human brain seems to be able to handle simultaneously.
For those who read Danish, or even Scandinavian, there are more on advertising fundamentals in these articles and this book. Or even, and much better, try to get a copy of the book in question.
The main tag of this thread on advertising fundamentals is rules of persuasion so you can always come back to it by hitting that tag in the tag cloud.
Other posts
You’ll find direct links to the other posts in this series on advertising fundamentals, below. If the post title is linked, it means that the posts has been submitted, and that you will get to it if you follow the link. If the fundamental is not yet linked, it means that that the post is not there yet. So you need to have a little patience.
First Fundamental: One Unified Impression.
Second Fundamental: Dominant Mood.
Third Fundamental: Visual and Verbal.
Fourth Fundamental: The Simple Truth.
Fifth Fundamental: Product of Consumer.
Sixth Fundamental: The Right Consumer.
Seventh Fundamental: Thoughts Worth Entertaining.
If you want to go for the book making your learning curve steeper and faster, here is the Library Thing information on it. And you’ll get the full information here as well: Persuasion in Marketing, The Dynamics of Marketing’s Great Untapped Resource, John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1981.
All for now. Stay tuned. A post on the second fundamental will emerge on this blog real soon.
The “Rules” of Persuasion
I have been waiting for this. Or rather waiting for this book. I had it once, but it seem to have been lost. So I had to order a new copy. Used copy arrived to day from a book store in Canada. I had some difficulties tracking down a copy, but I managed by the help of Amazon. Thanks.
The name of the book is simply Persuasion in Marketing. Written by Horace S. Schwerin and Henry H. Nowell. Published by John Wiley & Sons in 1981. And if you belong to one of those (and there are many) that means that anything written more then 6 months back are either outdated or out of fashion, you should think again. If you are one of those simple minds, you are probably reading the wrong blog
The reasons I anticipated this book (apart from the fact that I have misled my original copy) are many. First of all I have written a series of articles based on it; secondly I have written a book partly based on it; thirdly it is extremely good reading for anyone who have the ambition of doing efficient, economical (and I don’t even mean money) communication. Commercial or not. The validity goes way beyond the area of marketing if you deal with the core message in the book. And again, I am surprises, that when I added this book to Library Thing less than 30 minutes ago, I am the only one to have this book in a personal library there.
The chapter that works particularly well from an operative point of view starts at page 157, and is titled The “Rules” of Persuasion. The section Seven Fundamentals is where we want to dig in. “Over the span of more than two decades SRC tested, in the United States and several other countries, some 50.000 commercials and other advertising messages. We could not help observing that certain fundamentals recurrently characterized the successful campaigns of our clients and were much less often to be found in weaker efforts. These fundamentals, it should be added, were not our brilliant personal discovery; all have been stated in similar form at one time or another by astute practitioners of advertising both before and since.”
Here are the seven fundamentals. Take good care of them, because they might turn out extremely valuable for you as well. And that might particularly be if you are in the advertising business and are in the habit of making huge sums of money doing expertise work in communication for products, people , ideas, causes or whatever the reason may be.
First Fundamental: One Unified Impression.
Second Fundamental: Dominant Mood.
Third Fundamental: Visual and Verbal.
Fourth Fundamental: The Simple Truth.
Fifth Fundamental: Product of Consumer.
Sixth Fundamental: The Right Consumer.
Seventh Fundamental: Thoughts Worth Entertaining.
Well, is does not seem of much, does it? I knew that I would hear that argument, because for many these fundamantal are merely trivial. You might think so, but I am not at all sure that you are at all right. Unless you want to lower that standard of persuasive communication.
From I have seen lately, and not so lately, very few people are able to live up to these “trivial” fundamentals when doing communication. If you are in the advertising business you may have a particular hard time meeting the standard here, since the audience sometimes are diffuse, the media scattered and the competition for mere attention to your message is hard to get.
I will not, of course leave it at this Hopefully you did not think so. I will, in future posts, elaborate on each fundamental. So just stay tuned, and get ready for some interesting stuff here as well. The first thing you should do is, however, getting a copy of Schwerin and Newell’s book. If is is still out there.
If you are into the Scandinavian languages, and are able to read the letters of The Royal Kingdom of Denmark you might in fact do very well and maybe a little bit better with this book. That is, if you can get it. Hmmm …. I might even have a word with the publisher.
Give it a thought on communication: Be serious in answering this question: How many pieces of advertising have you seen lately that really engage thought worth entertaining? And sent me a list of campaign so I can get entertained, as well
If you have read this post, your should also read this analysis of a famous Danish commercial.
Barthes’ Connotation Procedures: 3. Objects.
As mentioned in a recent post I will elaborate on Barthes’ connotation procedures in separate posts. Here comes the first one starting with Barthes’ third procedure: objects. There are, according to Barthes in his article, 6 areas for procedures in total.
3. Objects
Objects in themselves have connotative content. Barthes uses an example with a book case that might connote intellectualism. He states that “The interest lies in the fact that the objects are accepted inducers of associations of ideas (book-case = intellectual).. ” They can also work as symbols, he argues.
Some other examples; when you see an image of a big man in a close up, such a shot might connote power or dominance. When you have an image of a tiny woman that might connote fragility or fright. Obviously all object have second meaning connotations moving from neutral (in a neutral shot) to excessive in a more deliberately composed photograph.
Take a look at the “object” below. It is the rear of a car, but not any other car. It is the rear of a Bugatti Veyron at display in Berlin. Depending on the degree of car enthusiast you may or may not be, this picture will connote extreme wealth, extreme speed and excessive luxury to you. If you are not into cars at all, you might accept that this is indeed a stylish object of some class.
It is pretty clear from this picture (to me anyway), that images indeed contain second level contents; read connotations. This image does not only denote: rear of a car, but it strongly connote things like wealth and luxury, as well.
For more on connotations (and denotations) you could go here.
Copyright 2008: Knut Skjærven.
Library Thing. (Roland Barthes: Image, Music, Text, pages 15-31, Fontana Press 1977, UK. Essays selected and translated by Stephen Heath).
Buy the English translation of Barthes’ work. Follow the link and support the site:
Image-Music-Text
Barthes’ Connotation Procedures in Photography.
It is, according to Barthes, “possible to separate out various connotation procedures”. I will use Barthes’ “headlines” from his article, but bring in my own elaboration and examples. And pictures.
Barthes works with 6 procedures in his scheme. I will treat each one separately in forthcoming posts.
2. Pose
3. Objects
4. Photogenia
5. Aestheticism
6. Syntax
Stay tuned for a short separate treatment of each of Barthes’ connotation procedures. For a shortcut to some of his famous articles, please see the book referred to in Library Link below.
When I post on the individual procedures, I will link the separate posts from this introductory post. So, eventually you will be able to reach all posts from this post. Look for the links above, and you will notice that the post on 3. Objects is already there.
Good luck with it.
Library Thing. (Roland Barthes: Image, Music, Text, pages 15-31, Fontana Press 1977, UK. Essays selected and translated by Stephen Heath)
Buy the English translation of Barthes’ work. Follow the link and support the site:
Image-Music-Text
barebones’ Venn diagram
Picturing The Communication Process
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