PSYCHOLOGY OF ADVERTISING The psychology of advertising embraces the application of mod ern psychology to the problems of advertising. Every effect has a cause : human behaviour is just as susceptible of interpretation in terms of cause and effect as are the movements of the heavenly bodies. To understand behaviour one needs to understand its causes, and to control behaviour one needs to get control of its causes. The control of human behaviour in the purchase of goods is the ultimate aim of the advertiser.
After the proper appeal is chosen the advertiser is faced with the necessity of presenting it to his readers most effectively. At every step in this process psychological problems are encountered. For instance, in order to attract and hold attention the advertisement must be different from its neighbours ; it must be distinctive. Now, distinction of a given amount may be attained in a variety of ways and at varying cost, for example, by the use of a large space or by associating it with a novel radio program. But when full page advertisements are too common, and the use of a given radio technique is too nearly universal, both these devices lose their power of grasping the attention. Many other psychological ways of making the appeal effective are known, such as the influence of a pleasant state of mind, however it may be created, upon the memory ; the dependence of the comprehension of a message upon the intelligence level of its readers ; the dependence of the effec tiveness of the trade names and trade marks of commodities, of packages and other containers upon the ability of the reader to discriminate between them and those of competitors and imitators. All.these matters of attention value, of aesthetic quality, of ease of comprehension, of freedom from confusion with imitations and many others have been measured by methods developed in the psychological laboratory. For instance, an adaptation of the familiar free association test has been employed to measure the influence of years of advertising upon the familiarity of certain commodities, trade names and slogans in the minds of the public. By presenting a series of commodity names to a sampling of con sumers with the request that they report the first thing suggested by each, it has been possible not only to determine the relative familiarity of products in the minds of people, but to analyse some of the most important factors that determined their status. On the basis of the intelligence surveys that have been made of the popu lation of the U.S., the advertiser can adjust his story so as to be intelligible to any desired proportion of the population. Any ad vertising message that is to reach as many as three-fourths of the people of the United States must be expressed in the simplest pos sible words, with short uncomplicated sentences and, if printed, with the use of pictures whenever feasible.
Colour in Advertisingis as old as the painted signs of inns and shops. Commercial signs and business announcements cre ated by the artist's brush go back several centuries. The litho graphed poster for advertising purposes, as used in the modern sense, started with Jules Cheret about 1867. In printing (see PRINTING) the first colour advertisement was for a rug, and was prepared by one of the large mail order houses. The coloured elec tric sign followed close on the development of the incandescent lamp about the beginning of the loth century. The coloured tube lighting (the Neon vacuum coloured tube), came into vogue about 1925, and has largely revolutionized electrical display signs.
It was the half tone engraving, when developed into process printing, that made the use of colour practical for periodicals, catalogues, and other forms of printing, but, because of mechani cal difficulties it was not until about 1910 that the use of colour became common in publication advertising. New iridescent inks that would fuse without blotting out certain tones, highly surfaced papers, and printing presses that would register perfectly, all had to be developed before colour advertising became practical. About 192o the first rotary printing press was perfected for process coloured productions. Not until 1937 were the mechanical diffi culties overcome to such an extent that it was economically prac tical to print fractional page magazine advertisements in colour. Now it is not unusual to find fully one-half of the advertising space in periodicals printed in colour.
Posters and car and bus (or tram) advertising is more than 90% coloured. Owing to the fact that most poster printing is done by lithography, and that lithography developed colour processing long before it was practical on the letterpress, that form of ad vertising has practically always been in colour.
The first use of colour in advertising was to attract the at tention of the reader, but laboratory tests have indicated that adding colour increases the attention value of a display on a mag azine page only 13%. As the extra cost of printing in colour is more than 13%, that was unprofitable.
Colour advertising has been strikingly successful : (I) in por traying goods in their actual colours, (2) in giving various arti cles a setting of richness and a refined atmosphere, (3) in showing the appearance of the package or container, (4) in reproducing trade marks or other distinguishing features.
Colour in advertising is probably a cause as well as an effect of the greatly increased use of colour in dress, in furnishing and decorating the home, in the variety of tones in which automobiles are painted, and even in the selection of finishing materials by architects. New colours in all these applications were so attrac tively displayed in advertising that the vogue for colour was sped and spread by their vivid illustrations.
As colour advertising became an important commercial factor, psychologists carried on extensive investigations to determine colour preferences, but without much success, in so far as their researches could be applied to advertising. That cool colours— blues and greens—are more attractive for such displays as window trimming in hot weather than reds, yellows, and oranges has been shown. That the reverse is true only to a slight degree is some thing of an anomaly. This same principle has been successful in advertising for summer and winter resorts.
That women once preferred red and men blue was demonstrated for wearing apparel, but it is probably true that tastes have changed. As many red neckties as blue are sold by haberdashers, and more blue than red hats by milliners.
That there is a physiological as well as psychological effect of colour, seems to be established by such popular expressions as "feeling blue," a "grey day," "dark hours," "a drab existence." Also there is the acknowledgment adopted by accountants cen turies ago of using blue for the debtor side of the ledger and red for the credit side, as those tones were supposed to be symptomatic of the feelings when incurring and discharging debt. A red flag is known to be irritating to bulls. It is also an irritating colour for the eyes. However, advertisers have not found these traditional reactions useful.
Psychologists have established helpful combinations of colours in producing the maximum luminosity. The two colours which stand at the top for legibility for the greatest distance are black and yellow ; the latter as background. Black on white is the next most luminous combination. Also the cool colours used for tint ing the walls of a room make it look larger than if in white. Red or yellow make it seem smaller than white.