Three routes of persuasion
Giep Franzen
A consumer, whose attention has been activated by a piece of brand advertising, encounters three different kinds of stimuli: instrumental stimuli, symbolic stimuli, and advertising attributes (both form and execution stimuli).
Instrumental brand stimuli: These include all information – verbal, visual, or aural – which relates to the concrete attributes, the performance, and the effectiveness of the brand.
Symbolic brand stimuli: The symbolic stimuli combine all stimuli representing socio-psychological meanings. These include:
Social meanings:Stimuli representing certain types of users, their characteristics, characters and competencies, e.g., age, sex, social class, vitality, lifestyles,...