Coming from a background of creative advertising and graphic design, this is the third unit in marketing communication that I have undertaken. Throughout the semester it has been interesting covering new ground and theories that I would otherwise have been oblivious to. Although theories are intriguing, unless put them into practise and context, in my opinion prove to be little but pointless.

One of the theories I found more interesting was the weak vs. strong theory on advertising. The strong theory is the idea that advertising can influence people to buy something they haven’t purchased before. Furthermore if they continue to advertise the product/idea consumers will potentially repeatedly buy it. However, if it isn’t advertised frequently or with a wide enough spread the audience won’t want to buy the product. Alternatively the weak theory explains that advertising doesn’t actually make people want to buy a product or a brand, it’s just a reminder. It suggests that the advertising just reinforce past behaviour and reinforce positive attitudes.

Drawing on these theories and bringing it into a real life context for me, I’d have to suggest Tinder (the new 21st Century dating sensation) is an amazing analogy of how this works. For the strong theory, as people flick through self-promoting images of peers they gain awareness of them. If they have continued interaction/the peers self promote themselves further with chatting, potential interest and desire is gained and the audience is therefore influenced to buy into something they haven’t bought (met) before. However, if a peer’s image never appears of the audiences feed in the first place they won’t ever have any awareness and the consequent cycle of the theory. The weak theory can be examined by having awareness of peers trialling interaction with them and if the communication is positive enough they will be reinforced to interact. It’s also interesting to consider the tendencies to forget brands that you dislike and not pay attention to them therefore focussing energy on positively associated brands (as again, with peers on Tinder- apologies for drawing on this.)

Another aspect/idea that has really been driven home with me in this