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Definition
The way people are influenced by advertisements appearing in magazines, newspapers, and other visual media outlets.
Introduction
Humans and human-like stimuli are used extremely frequently in advertising, given their ability to attract attention better than almost any other stimuli. As consumers, we are exposed to a wide array of marketing messages every day, many of which are shown to us visually through pictures or commercials featuring other humans. One group of humans that is hugely over-represented in advertising, and whose presence is presumed to produce profit, is aesthetically appealing and attractive humans. Pictures of such “hot” humans are often used with the implicit assumption that they will benefit the advertised products or brands through the beauty and sex appeal they convey. Even though meta-analytical research shows that sex does not sell particularly well in advertising (Lull and Bushman 2015)...
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References
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Otterbring, T. (2017). People’s Responses to Personal Ads. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_248-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_248-1
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