102 CHAPTER 3 HOW MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS WORKprocessing is Ehrenberg’s reinforcement model. According to this model, awareness leads to
trial and trial leads to reinforcement. Product experience is the dominant variable in the
model, and advertising is supposed to reinforce habits, frame experience (see previous section)
and defend consumers’ attitudes.^109 A similar model is called the routinised response behaviour
model and assumes that a large number of product experiences can lead to routinised
response behaviour, especially for low-involvement, frequently purchased products such as
toilet paper, toothpaste, paper tissues, mineral water or chewing gum.^110 In this case, consumers
do not spend much time on deciding which brand to buy, but buy a particular brand out of
habit. In other words, previous behaviour guides future behaviour. Although the initial brand
choice may have been thoroughly elaborated, routinised response behaviour is characterised
by no or very low cognitive effort in which very few possibilities are considered. The fact that
routinised response behaviour is a frequently used purchase strategy is illustrated by a study
observing consumers who were buying detergents in a supermarket:^111 83% of the 120 con-
sumers observed took only one brand while no more than 4% picked up more than one brand
to investigate them a bit closer. It took the consumers on average 13 seconds to walk down
the aisle and choose a detergent. Obviously, no extended problem-solving was used here.
Building brand awareness and trying to become top of mind is very important here in order
to be included in the limited set of brands that a consumer is willing to consider, to retain
brand loyalty and to enhance brand-switching to the own brand.
As becomes obvious from previous sections, a lot of communications models have been
presented and all of them found empirical support in some circumstances. However, the key
seems to be to define which variables influence the way a consumer deals with marketing
communications. Motivation, ability and opportunity certainly are very important variables,
although an even more important factor – previous brand experience – has been neglected
most of the time. Future research will no doubt try to integrate this variable further and will
propose new models. One thing is certain: communications processing is a complex subject
and predicting how someone is going to respond to a certain stimulus will always be a
cumbersome task. As is the case with consumer behaviour, theories and models can only
help us to understand consumers and their responses a bit better. Attention will be devoted
now to two phenomena that are major concerns to advertisers, namely irritation and brand
confusion.Causes and consequences of irritation evoked by advertising
When ad-evoked feelings were discussed above, in general only positive feelings were con-
sidered. In this section, frequently experienced negative feelings are addressed. Irritation
can be defined as ‘provoking, annoying, causing displeasure, and momentary impatience’.^112
As mentioned before, many researchers use different feeling scales and, as a consequence,
come up with different feeling dimensions. However, a striking result is that in many studies
investigating consumers’ responses to advertising, an irritation dimension appears.^113 In other
words, irritation seems to be a basic reaction to marketing communications. Two questions
arise: What causes irritation? And what are the consequences of ad-evoked irritation for
advertising effectiveness?Causes of irritation
A number of factors can cause irritation. They are shown in Figure 3.9. As for media,
consumers mention television as one of the most irritating communications media, the
reason being that commercials interrupt programmes.^114 For the same reason, interruption of
an ongoing task, as well as for the intrusive character, pop-up ads are also considered to be
rather irritating.^115 Concerning irritating ad content, several elements can be identified.^116M03_PELS3221_05_SE_C03.indd 102 6/5/13 3:03 PM