Advertising's effect on consumer purchase behavior across age groups

¶ … social sciences. In general, qualitative research looks to gain an in-depth understanding of both human behavior and the reasons for human behavior. In other words, qualitative research focuses on the why and the how of decision making.

One pattern of human behavior is the effect advertising has on an individual's patterns of consumption. This paper focuses on how a qualitative research study could be conducted on the question of the effect of advertising on individual consumer patters and habits.

The amount of money spent on advertising consumer products is rising every year. (Graydon, 2003 p. 156). At its most fundamental definition, advertising is paid and/or sometimes free communication through a medium in which the sponsor is identified and the message is controlled. The methods used for advertisements are diverse, including publicity, public relations, product placements, sponsorships, underwriting and sales promotion. Further, every medium imaginable is used to send the advertiser's message to the consumer, including television, radio, movies, magazines, newspapers, Internet and billboards. (Young, 2005 p. 76). Everywhere one looks there is advertisements.

With all this money spent on making advertisement a prevalent part of society, the question becomes what is the impact of advertisement, especially as to the its effect on consumer purchase motive? The impact of advertising has been a widely debated matter with many different claims being made on multiple sides. Proponents of advertisement typically argue that advertisements inform consumers about important aspects of a product and let them make intelligent decisions in their purchasing behavior. (Wernick, 1991, p. 242). Critics, on the other hand, will typically argue advertisement provides a biased view of a product and actually harms the consumer by increasing the costs of the product to account for the large amounts of money used in advertising it. (Rapailee, 2006, p. 68).

Abstract of Study

The purpose of this market research study is to discover how advertising affects or impacts, if at all, the behavior of consumer purchase motive and the reasons for or lack of impact. To make this determination, the study will use a focus group. The focus group will be comprised of sub-groups made up of various age groups, namely ages fourteen to eighteen, nineteen to twenty-nine, thirty to forty, forty to fifty, fifty to sixty and above. Each age group will consist of ten individuals, half male and half female. Each individual will be randomly selected through an email inquiry. The emails will be gathered using various consumer and organizational lists. The emails will be sent to random individuals and the first ten to respond will become part of the focus group.

The purpose of using the various age groups is because advertising, or certain forms of advertising, may have a different effect on the purchase motive of the different age groups. Further, these different age groups may have different purchase motives. More so, both males and females will be used in order to determine any variances on effect of purchase motive between the genders.

Once the focus group is selected, each individual will be required to maintain a journal, recording all of the products they purchase on a given day. The following week they will be required to maintain a journal recording the advertisements that effect them on a given day. After both journals are complete, each participant will be required to respond to a questionnaire focusing on the reasoning behind their purchases.

With these two journals, comparisons can be made to see if the advertisements that they were subjected to correlated with their purchases. The reason for having the purchase journal preceded the advertisement journal is to ensure that the participants do not consciously make or not make certain purchases in order to correlate or not correlate with the advertisements they were subjected to. The results of the journal and survey potion of the research will be substantiated with a controlled experiment, as explained below.

Hypothesis

It is predicted that the consumer study groups' individual purchasing motive will correlate with the advertisements they are subjected to, thus demonstrating that advertisement has a persuasive effect or impact on the behavior of consumer purchase motives.

If you change brands, what causes you to change?

Another important form of research is the conducting of experiments. Experiments are particularly helpful when a researcher wants to rule out all but one explanation for a specific observation. For example, if an observer notices an increase in sales of a particular item after the commencement of a particular advertisement campaign, that observer may want to know whether the increase in sales was because of the advertisement or because of other factors (such as shelf-space, unrelated demand, etc.). An experiment allows the observer to control all the variables and thus could involve inviting people to shop in a simulated store. Half of the respondents are shown the advertisements, the other half is not. Thus, the observer will be able to know whether the advertisement is the cause of the increase in sales, therefore knowing that the advertisement has a positive effect on consumer purchase motive. Naturally, the major draw back to using an experiment is that the consumer is removed from their natural surroundings. (Girden, 2001, 167).

In this study, an experiment will be used after the survey as a method of further verifying the survey results. The participants of the experiment portion of the study will be different from the journal participants as the purpose of the experiment cannot be known prior to the experiment. These individuals will be recruited via email, similar to that of the journal recruitment email. However, the email will only detail that they have been selected to participate in a free shopping spree at a given time and place in appreciation for their loyal patronage. Another possibility is to set up a drawing at the selected store. From the individuals who register, random participants can be selected.

The experiment itself will utilize a simulated shopping environment will be set up. Half the participants will be bombarded with advertisements while shopping and prior to shopping (such as having ads mailed and emailed to them). The other half will not be bombarded with the advertisements for that particular brand and products. All other variables will be the same. After the experiment, the observer will be able to compare the purchases of the two groups to see if the advertisement group purchased the advertised brand and product more than the non-advertisement group.

Another potentially beneficial method to be used is the focus group. The focus group is essentially the foundation of the journal portion of the research. A focus group typically involves gathering together a group of six to twelve consumers to discuss the role of advertisements. Focus groups are most useful in situations where one does not have specific questions to ask, therefore making it an excellent starting point for the Brisbane Metropolitan Consumer Research study. (Girden, 2001, p. 186). Further, by starting with a focus group, the survey questions will be less likely biased as they will be based on the unbiased information gathered from the initial focus group. Therefore, in the Brisbane project, the various consumer focus groups will be given journals to keep track of all of the purchases for one week and all of the advertisements they see the following week. The data will then be gathered to see what, if any, correlation there is between the consumer's purchases and the advertisements that they were aware of. From this general, focus group based information, the survey questions will be able to be drawn up in order to delve deeper into the reasons for the correlations or lack thereof.

It may be helpful to immediately follow up the focus group study, prior to the survey questions, with a personal interview. This will allow the observer to fill in some blanks by asking in-depth questions that will be helpful in formulating proper survey questions. Because personal interviews are extremely vulnerable to interviewer bias, this portion of the research should be given little credibility and serve merely as a way to formulate the survey and to gain feedback on how the focus group research portion worked and where it may have been improved.

Essay

In conclusion, it is felt that the results of this thorough, multi-dimension qualitative research study on the effect of advertisement on consumer purchase motive will demonstrate a direct correlation between advertising and consumer purchase motive. Although this correlation may vary between sub-consumer groups such as gender, age and income, when looking at the consumer group as a whole, consumer purchase motive will be effected by advertisement.

This prediction is made both from the general premise that advertisers continue to spend millions of dollars a year on advertisements and the general results presented in prior, similarly conducted research. If advertising did not have a positive effect on consumer purchase motive, advertisers would not spend the money to advertise. Yet, this general fact does not mean that consumer research no longer needs to occur. The purpose of this proposed research and that of others endeavors to further understand the details of just how advertising effects consumer purchase motive. (Schor, 2005, et. al.).

The purpose of the proposed research project is to study the particular details of how advertising effects the consumer purchase motive of the population.

Specifically, because of its use of multiple research approaches and a sampling of a diverse array of the sub-populations that make up the consumer population, the results of this study will show a clear, representative picture of exactly how advertisement effects consumer purchase motive.

Appendix

There are little, if any, ethical considerations involved in this research proposal. Because the initial focus group will be selected via email and the subsequent surveys sent via email, there will have to be some consideration as to sensitivity of sending to certain email addresses and how this information is gathered. If people receiving the email feel that it is unnecessary SPAM, they will most likely not respond. The initial contact should also be clear to state where their email information was gotten.

Further, in the controlled shopping environment experiment, the individuals will not know that they are part of an experiment. Likewise, they will not know that their purchasing practices are being observed and, in the case of the advertisement control group, being purposely influenced. Because one cannot ethically try to influence the customers spending of their own money, this experiment will be carried out as a promotional event, where each participant will be given a set amount of money to spend at the store, awarded in the guise of an award.

Finally, all participants will eventually have to be informed of the nature of the research. This is particularly true if the research results will be using names or other identifying information. All consumer participants should be required to sign a waiver and release of information.