Understanding the Psychology of the Effectiveness of Social Advertisement Campaign for a Positive Social change

Journal of Research and Development A Multidisciplinary International Level Referred and Double Blind Peer Reviewed, Open Access ISSN : 2230-9578 | Website: https://jrdrvb.org Volume-17, Issue-9(V)| September 2025 139 Understanding the Psychology of the Effectiveness of Social Advertisement Campaign for a Positive Social change Shruti Shamsundar Kekade1, Dr Amrapali Jogdand2 1Research Scholar, Department of Psychology MGM University Chh Sambhajinagar 2Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology MGM University Chh Sambhajinagar Email: [email protected] Manuscript ID: JRD -2025-170934 ISSN: 2230-9578 Volume 17 Issue 9 (V) Pp. 139-141 Sept. 2025 Submitted:15 Aug. 2025 Revised: 25 Aug. 2025 Accepted: 10 Sept. 2025 Published: 30 Sept. 2025 Abstract: India is currently running a number of social advertisement campaigns which are government initiatives and also on concerning areas for the societal improvement. The objective here is to bring out the effectiveness into the limelight through various aspects like awareness, perception, attitude, emotions which are the variants of psychology. Social media offers a cost effective platforms where such effectiveness is shown through the appeals. The appeals are in the two forms the emotional appeal and rational appeal. The facts provided here helps in bringing out for a positive social change that includes an attitude formation to attitude change and to have a positive social cognition. Keywords: Social advertisement campaigns, Emotional appeals, rational appeals, attitude change. Introduction: According to Wheeler, “Advertising” is any shape or sort of paid or premium nonindividual presentation of merchandise, administrations and thoughts with the end goal of drafting individuals to purchase” Advertising is the messages paid for by the individuals who need to advance, convince, or advise the recipient about the items or administrations. The mediums utilized are television, print media (daily paper, diaries, magazines et cetera), radio, squeeze, net, coordinate offering, boards, mailers, challenges, sponsorships, crusades, individuals, articles of clothing, tints, sounds and visuals. Social Advertising is not for the most part utilized for business showcasing purposes, yet rather for social advantage. Social advertising has two parent hypotheses to bolster itself with the end goal that – “a social parent” where sociology and social strategy methodologies is stressed upon and the second is “Showcasing guardian” that incorporates business and open part promoting approaches.Social advertising is moreover, being investigated as a method for social development, its gem rectifier to broaden obvious essentially based practices among associations and is at present center’s ability for open part directors. The possibility of advancement and promotion is experiencing a change in India. Commercials in any sort have started to assume an impressive part in ensuring the stock with the goal that it achieves its objective. Promotions have turned into a fundamental piece of our life. Social advertising is the advertising-intended to inform, aware, educate or stimulate the target audience about social cause or issue for the betterment of society. Social Advertising is mostly undertaken by non-profit organizations such as Government, Foundations, Associations etc. Quick Response Code: Website: https://jrdrvb.org/ DOI: Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) This is an open access journal, and articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License, which allows others to remix, tweak, and build upon the work noncommercially, as long as appropriate credit is given and the new creations ae licensed under the idential terms. Address for correspondence: Shruti Shamsundar Kekade , Research Scholar, Department of Psychology, MGM University Chh Sambhajinagar How to cite this article: S. S. Kekade, A. Jogdand. (2025).Understanding the Psychology of the Effectiveness of Social Advertisement Campaign for a Positive Social change. Journal of Research & Development, 17(9), 139-141 Original Article Journal of Research and Development A Multidisciplinary International Level Referred and Double Blind Peer Reviewed, Open Access ISSN : 2230-9578 | Website: https://jrdrvb.org Volume-17, Issue-9(V)| September 2025 140 The main objective or the goal of social advertising is to primarily focus and engage in social cause. For example, advertisements are done to promote donations for war victims or for victims which are affected by natural calamities, or for spreading awareness etc.There are wide ranges of social problems in every human Human society, poverty, female foeticide, and killing of the girl child, animal cruelty and many more. Social advertising isn’t tied in with offering a prompt arrangement, however to attract somebody’s regard for the issue. There are a ton of issues which are not seen, and individuals know nothing about them. The objective of social promotion is to pass on the message, so that the beneficiary understands his obligation towards the society. Social advertisements can’t be comprehended as a liberality of imaginative individuals from one viewpoint, and as a chance to demonstrate their inventiveness then again.The primary objective of social advertisement is to change the target audience’s behavior. So to change the behavioral aspect of the target audience a thorough understanding of a person’s awareness level, his or her perception and attitude towards the various social marketing campaigns should be understood. The expected changes in the target audience after getting exposed to the various social advertisements generally occurs at the end of a series of intermediate stages such as change in population’s information, knowledge, perception, etc. But surprisingly, it has been observed that most of the social campaigns have had a Minute effect in fighting those social causes. Therefore effort has been initiated through this research article to explore the awareness, perception and effectiveness of social advertisements in every individuals and how psychological variants comes into such change. Emotional and Rational appeal: The appeal which leverages feelings and emotions like happiness, fear, love, nostalgia, empathy to create a strong bond, personal connection through using various techniques like storytelling, music, vivid imagery. The connection is brought by aiming the logical part of the brain. Some negative emotions are also revealed and highlighted such as sadness, guilt, anger and fear. Let’s see how does positive and negative emotions helps in bringing the change. Positive Emotions: Happiness/Joy: it creates a sense of positive and connection. Nostalgia: it helps to Evokes comforting, familiar feelings from the past. Inspiration: it encourages people to pursue dreams and overcome challenges. Love/connection: it highlights heartwarming stories of empathy and shared moments. Negative Emotions: Fear: it highlights risks or consequences to motive action. Sadness: it appeals to empathy to inspire action, often for social causes. Anger: it taps into frustrations or injustices to motivate a stand or support for a cause. Guilt: it can be used to highlight the importance and appeal of how the things haven been affecting negatively. Rational Appeal: A rational appeal uses its facts, reasoning to focus on the message of practical things, its value and the basic and its fundamental needs by presenting value aided data, statistics and comparisions. Let’s see its fundamental key characteristics: Emphasis on facts and data: Use of statistics and measurable results helps to claim and give a proper social direction. Objective information: The goal of the social advertising is to provide the information with clear, undeniable facts so to help people under the true meaning of the explanation mentioned in the advertisement. Aiming for practical needs: It helps to know the practical requirements and make a sensibile decision and choices. Attitude Change: In general attitudes are learned through one’s own experiences and through interaction with others. Some social psychologist have focused on the conditions which lead to the learning attitudes. Like learning attitude by association, by being rewarded or punished, learning attitude through modelling and learning through exposure to information. While we talk about attitude change it basically forms or rather gets influenced with the factors like 1. Family and the environment around us 2. Reference groups which indicate to an individual the norms regarding acceptable behaviour and ways of thinking 3. Personal experience which bring about drastic change in our attitude towards people and our own life. The attitude change happens when we balance our attitude from negative to positive direction which was proposed by Fritz Heider. The concept cognitive dissonance given by Leon Festinger which emphasis es the cognitive component which says the logic of the attitude should be logically in line with each other for example Cognition 1: Pan Masala causes mouth cancer Cognition 2: I eat pan masala Journal of Research and Development A Multidisciplinary International Level Referred and Double Blind Peer Reviewed, Open Access ISSN : 2230-9578 | Website: https://jrdrvb.org Volume-17, Issue-9(V)| September 2025 141 Holding this two ideas or cognition an individual feel that something is out of the tune. therefore here-the ideas will change to I will eat pan masala so this will be healthy, logical and sensible way of changing the attitude towards it. The two step concept was proposed by S.M Mohsin an Indian psychologist, according to him attitude change takes place in the form of two steps. In first step, the target of change identifies with the source. The target is the person whose attitude is to be changed. The source is the person through whose influence the change is to take place. Identification means that the target has liking and regard for the source .There should be positive attitude towards the target and the attraction becomes mutual. Observing the source’s changed attitude and behaviour the target also shows an attitude change through behaviour. This kind of imitation or observational learning. The Rationality In India, primarily the government has taken many initiatives to discover the possible impact of social advertising. Many promotional advertisements are being run on radio and Tv. All the government and other organizations are trying to handle some serious social issues like ‘Pulse Polio’, ‘Family Planning’, ‘Save the Girl Child’ etc. through social advertising and social marketing campaigns. However, it has been observed that the best efforts of the government agencies the social advertisements campaigns are trying to be effective. Awareness throws light on the knowledge about social advertisements, perception talks about social issues favored by people and reasons for those issues to get preference. Effectiveness and attraction will guide the ad makers and other agencies involved in social marketing how to use awareness and attraction to make advertisements more influential and effective. The litmus test of any social advertising, advertisement is its ability to initiate people into something new i.e. to bring about perceptual and behavioral change which has been also studied in detail. There are few studies regarding social advertisements and social marketing campaigns in India. The advertisement brands like Dove is bringing change for body shaming, Aerial brand is focusing on gender equality for sharing the equal load Surf excel is promoting for respect and gratitude for every religion and bringing the closeness and brotherhood among each other and many more. Conclusion: To whole and sole we are here to say even though government is taking initiative to bring up the change with the help of social advetisements there is a hope as well as a room for improvement. Were in the 21st centutury and juggling with certain areas of concern. Things take time to change even though gradually through the various modes of spreading the message adding the appropirate appeal that influence audience social behaviour which brings out a social change to bring out world as a better place for living and accepted by all the means. Normalizing, changing, accepting without any prejudices and stereotypes that’s what all needed to bring out the social change among the people we live. References: 1. Altinay, Z., Saner, T., Bahçelerli, N. M., & Altinay, F. (2016). The role of social media tools: Accessible tourism for disabled citizens. Journal of Educational Technology & Society, 19(1), 89–99. 2. Anderson, S. P., & Coate, S. (2005). 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