VALORACIÓN DE LA CAPACIDAD FUNCIONAL, ESTRATIFICACIÓN DEL RIESGO Y

Demographic information was collected through five questions and they were related to musical orientation, music preference, radio listening hours, gender, and age. These questions are listed in Appendix 4.8.

4.4 CONTROLS

The controlled variables were necessary to isolate the effects of the background music on various cognitive processes and memory. They were level of involvement and motivation, placement of the advertisement, visual stimulation, product category, and music placement.

- Placement of the advertisement

The experiment advertisement was placed with two other distracting advertisements.

The position of the advertisement was fixed in the first place across all the groups. A possible counter argument for such placement would be drawn from the serial position

𝑊𝑀𝐶 =

𝑐_𝑗

|𝜔𝑖|𝑗=1

|𝜔_𝑖| 𝑛i=1

𝑛

𝑊ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒;

𝑛 = 𝑛𝑢𝑚𝑏𝑒𝑟 𝑜𝑓 𝑤𝑜𝑟𝑑 𝑠𝑒𝑡𝑠 𝜔_𝑖 = 𝑖^𝑡ℎ 𝑤𝑜𝑟𝑑 𝑠𝑒𝑡

𝑐_𝑗= 𝑎𝑛𝑠𝑤𝑒𝑟 𝑡𝑜 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑗^𝑡ℎ 𝑖𝑡𝑒𝑚 {1 𝑜𝑟 0}

4-5

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effect (Murdock, 1962), which suggests that primacy and rencency would be in effect for the items placed in the first and later parts of a list. However, this experiment disregarded this notion based on (a) such effect would be in place for longer lists and, in this case, it was only three adverts; (b) the other two advertisements were intended to be used as lures in such a way that there would be some kind of activity between the target advertisement and the memory test; and (c) to rule out any guesses that the participants may make on the advertisement in the middle that may bear some significance.

- Unimodal stimulation

It was found on many occasions that multimodal stimulation would utilise different modality specific resources to process signals (e.g. Buchweitz, Mason, Tomitch, & Just, 2009; Bushara et al., 1999; Ruchkin et al., 1997) that would raise concerns outside the scope of this research. Therefore, considering the nature of the hypotheses being tested here, it was decided to use auditory stimuli only in order to make it unimodal.

Furthermore, not only would visual stimuli in an advertisement grab the attention, but also tend to be more influential. Thus, it would be inevitable to avoid memory of the message being influenced by the memory activations through such visual stimuli and therefore, the effects of the manipulations may be contaminated. In addition, other forms of stimulation were disregarded for the reason that the context of the present study is radio advertisements.

- Product category

Different product categories have different levels of consumer involvement (Kotler &

Armstrong, 2008) and varying levels of involvement may pose an interest in certain group of subjects in the sample. To minimise such a situation, it was decided to choose a product category which might have a common interest for everyone but where the complexity of the message can be manipulated easily. Thereupon, treatment adverts in this experiment was chosen to be on financial services.

- Background music

As mentioned in Chapter Two, the use of music in ads can be either foreground or background music. When used as a part of the expressed message such as a sung message, music becomes the foreground in an advertisement. Thus, one cannot be

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identified without the presence of the other due to the integral nature of those stimuli (Lantos & Craton, 2012).On the other hand , music is considered as background when detached from the expressed message and the stimuli can be separately identified.

Therefore, in this experiment, only background music was used.

- Instrumental music

Background music in an advert can be instrumental, vocal, or both. However, the vocal component of music was found to have a distracting effect on the message being processed for the reason that (a) resources specific to the vocal modality had to be shared (Crawford & Strapp, 1994; Salamé & Baddeley, 1989), and (b) the vocal parts of the music may prime certain memory (Johnson & Halpern, 2012; Peretz, Radeau, &

Arguin, 2004) related to lyrics that would pose a competition for the resources in the working memory. With the intention of avoiding these influences, only instrumental music was used.

- Music placement

Place of the music in an advert stimulate orienting-response effects (Brooker &

Wheatley, 1994; Lang, 2000). For instance, it may bring in lead-in and highlighting effects on the message being presented (Brooker & Wheatley, 1994). To minimise any such biasness, the experimental adverts had music throughout the entire advert acting as a wrap for the message.

- Involvement with the Experiment

The literature pertaining to music and message complexity acknowledged involvement as an influential factor. Furthermore, it could affect memory in such a way that a high level of involvement could result in better memory than a low level due to elaboration (see Section 3.5.1). Therefore, the level of involvement with the experiment was maintained at a high level by including the following text before they were exposed to the experimental advertisements. The word “evaluation” was purposefully omitted with the purpose of creating a less stressful test environment.

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“The three radio advertisements used in this experiment are considered to have unique characteristics that are highly regarded by many scholars and advertisers around the world. Therefore, please listen to each ad attentively and tell us honestly how you feel about them.”

In order to check whether such control was achieved to the expected level, participants were asked to rate “In general, how involved / engaged did you feel when you took part in this experiment?” on a 7-point scale (1 – Not at all; 7 – Very Much). One sample t-test was carried out considering 4.00 as the threshold for determining high (or low) level of involvement (see Appendix 10.2, p. 329). The results indicated that the intended level of involvement was achieved (𝑀 = 6.25; 𝑡 (283) = 40.92, 𝑝 < .00).

4.5 PRETESTING

For the reason that the experiment advertisements were created specifically for this experiment, there was a series of pretesting carried out to ensure that the intended levels of manipulations were met. Accordingly, an expert panel discussion were conducted first to evaluate a set of differently complex messages followed by pretesting II for selecting the most appropriate stimuli (both music and message) for the advertisement.

A pilot test was then conducted to ensure that the entire experiment procedure was free from major technical shortcomings. A summary of each test is presented below and a full description of the respective pretest in Appendix 1 (p. 245).