Social Cognition and Advertising: Research on Minorities and Attractiveness

In the present dissertation I focus on the representation of two areas in the field of social cognition that are highly influential for advertising: representation of minority groups and attractiveness. In my first essay, I review the literature on minorities in advertising. According to my analysis, the number of top journal articles in advertising about minorities is deficient (85 articles among the top seven journals that publish in advertising, less then 0.01%). Most of the literature looked at the consumption practices of minorities and their role in reinforcing the minority group identities or helping them to cope with identity threat. While the most represented minority group is the ethnic minority, most of the articles focused on investigating their consumption practices. Future research should broaden its focus by considering other minority groups (e.g., people with disabilities, homosexuals). In addition, previous literature in marketing, under the influence of social identity theory, focused mostly on the persuasive power of minority groups when the target population matches the source ethnicity. Future research should investigate the persuasive power of minorities on the consumption practices of a broader audience. The second essay of the dissertation aims to fill this gap in the literature. According to theories of persuasion, advertising should work best when endorsers and target audience match on salient characteristics such as gender or race. The persuasion potential of minority endorsers should hence be very limited as they would appeal only to that minority audience. Potentially negative aspects such as stereotypes and stigmata associated with minorities would be projected onto the brand and harm consumer attitudes and decrease choice. I argue that this view of consumers and their reactions to minority endorsers is outdated. I investigate the impact of a minority that ― according to the above theories ― should be among the least effective in promoting products and brands: models with a physical disability. Adopting the perspective of social identity theory, I hypothesize and show that when brands express a positive social value, consumers develop more positive attitudes toward the ad and the brand. In the case of a brand endorser with a disability, consumers reward the brand for expressing social inclusivity. My studies suggest that ads with models with a disability reverse the traditional model–brand relationship in advertising. Rather than a model endorsing a brand, in ads with models with a disability the brand endorses the model, and hence the value of social inclusivity. Consumers reward brands that do so. In the third essay of my dissertation I focus on how pupil size affects consumers' perceptions of a model's attractiveness and its downstream consequences for product choice. Previous research has found pupil dilation to signal interest to the observer, which is used to explain why models with larger pupils are found to be more attractive. While prior research has explained the impact of pupil size on observers’ perceptions through a physiological route (i.e., pupil mimicry), I propose that, in marketing contexts, pupil size affects consumers’ evaluations though an aesthetic route. I argue that, because eyes with smaller pupils reveal a more colorful and brighter eye, constricted pupils improve the model's perceived attractiveness and the ad's evaluation. Six experiments show that models with constricted (versus dilated) pupils are perceived as more physically attractive and, consequently, they improve consumers’ attitudes toward the advertisement. Despite finding that consumers automatically assimilate to the model’s pupil size, our results show that pupil mimicry does not affect ad evaluations. Thus, in advertising, consumers seem to be more directly influenced by the ad's aesthetic properties than by their physiological reactions.