Actually, the similarities between these two exciting fields are amazing, including terminology – one small example, “storyboards”! The challenges are also common – fleeting attention of audience, constraints of space and time, difficulty in measuring their effectiveness…

I have started my career in Marketing and Sales and even taught Advertising Management for a while. Studying the principles and practices of advertising and relating them to the design and development of eLearning programs can be an exhilarating experience.

I think that eLearning professionals can learn a lot from the dynamic and relatively more mature field of Advertising. We all know and experienced the power of advertising!

Actually, advertising aims to change behavior and learning is defined as a permanent change in behavior. The former changes buyers’ behavior and the later changes employee behavior to improve performance (in a corporate setting). Both are a sophisticated form of communication.

I would like to share a traditional model of communication used in advertising. The AIDA model suggests that an advertising campaign should attract Attention, gain Interest, create Desire, and precipitate Action.

Another hierarchy model is particularly interesting because of its close ties with social psychology theory. It includes 6 stages – awareness, knowledge, liking, preference, conviction and purchase. The stages can be divided into 3 components corresponding to a social psychologists concept of an attitude system. The first stage, consisting of awareness and knowledge, is comparable to the cognitive or the knowledge component of attitude. The affective component of an attitude, the like-dislike aspect, is represented by liking and preference levels. The remaining attitude component is the conative component, the action or motivation element, represented by conviction and purchase levels.

If we can study these theories and juxtapose them with what we use in learning, we may come out with some interestingly new approaches.

I will be very interested to read your views. Thank you for reading my blog.

RK Prasad

CEO