Cue Management: Using Fitness Cues to Enhance Advertising Effectiveness

Current thinking on advertising processing highly parallels contemporary psychological theory and research revealing that there are two distinct brain systems at work in human information processing and decision making: System 1 (S1, evolutionarily old, unconscious/preconscious, automatic, fast, and intuitive) and System 2 (S2, evolutionarily recent, conscious, controlled, slow, and reflective). Indeed, state-of-the-art models of advertising processing equally distinguish two different persuasive routes: one in which the consumer focuses on product/brand attribute information and in which he/she engages in elaborated information processing (S2), and one in which she/he processes the ad only superficially in terms of a handful of meaningful “cues” (S1). Regarding S2 advertising processing, means-end-chain theory offers a sound theoretical framework. However, regarding S1 advertising processing the question remains: What constitutes a meaningful cue? Here, I will argue that both the idea of evolutionary old systems like the S1 systems (evolved “mental organs”) and the idea of cues activating them (“fitness cues”) are central to evolutionary psychology. I will also present the results of a large scale experiment investigating the impact these cues can have on ad-likeability scores (as indicators of the advertising effectiveness). This experiment equally reveals the value of evolutionary psychology as a sound perspective for cue management practices.