Abstract:

Social psychology can teach us a good deal about the ways people behave and how they choose between possible alternative courses of action. Much of the work is difficult to find and difficult to follow. By its very nature it is rarely discussed in the marketing departments of industrial companies. The work is perhaps most often encountered in the advertising trade papers, indeed it is in the field of advertising communication that the most recent benefit of psychological research will be seen. This paper examines some cases where abstruse psychological research has become a prosaic useful and widely used weapon in the marketing man's armoury.