Identifying Your Core Market: Understanding Receivers as Target Audience

Every advertisement you see is aimed at someone specific – and that “someone” is the target audience. Whether it’s a skincare brand running a campaign for urban millennials or a tractor company reaching out to farmers, the success of advertising communication depends entirely on how well advertisers understand who they’re speaking to. At its core, advertising is not just about creating compelling messages – it’s about getting the right message to the right people at the right time. Two influential frameworks help explain how this works: Stern’s Multidimensional Model of Advertising and the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM). Together, they reveal the layered complexity of who sends advertising messages, how those messages are constructed, and – most critically – how receivers actually process them.

What advertising communication is really trying to do 🔗

Before any discussion of audience models, it’s worth grounding the conversation in what advertising communication is actually designed to accomplish. Advertising has three primary objectives: to inform, to persuade, and to remind. These are not just academic categories – they map directly onto where a product or brand sits in its lifecycle and what the audience needs to hear.

Informative advertising introduces something new – a product, a feature, a brand – and builds initial awareness. Think of a pharmaceutical company launching a new drug and running detailed ads about its uses and benefits. Persuasive advertising, on the other hand, works to shift attitudes and motivate action. It’s most prevalent in competitive markets where multiple brands are vying for the same consumer. Its goal is to encourage switching, trial, or brand loyalty. Reminder advertising targets consumers who are already aware of a product and simply need a nudge – the Coca-Cola ad you see during the holidays isn’t telling you what Coke is; it’s reinforcing your emotional association with it.

But here’s the thing: none of these objectives can be achieved without a clear-eyed understanding of who the receiver actually is. The moment advertising loses sight of its audience, it fails – no matter how creative or expensive the campaign might be.

Who is a “receiver” in advertising? 🔗

In traditional communication theory, the receiver is simply the person on the other end of a message. In advertising, however, the receiver is far more layered than that – and Barbara B. Stern’s landmark 1994 paper, A Revised Communication Model for Advertising, published in the Journal of Advertising, makes this complexity explicit.

Stern argued that advertising operates more like crafted literary text than ordinary speech, and because of this, all three elements of communication – the source, the message, and the receiver – must be understood as multidimensional. This is what sets advertising apart from a conversation between two people.

Stern’s Multidimensional Model: unpacking the receiver 🔗

The model expands the traditional communication triad by inscribing advertisers, promotional text, and consumers as multidimensional participants in a complex interactive process. To understand what this means in practice, let’s focus on the receiver dimension – arguably the most important for anyone thinking about target audiences.

The implied consumer 🔗

The first type of receiver exists entirely within the text of the ad itself. The implied consumer is the idealized audience member imagined by the ad’s creative team. This is not a real person – it’s a constructed persona who perfectly understands the ad’s references, responds to its tone, and accepts the values it presents. When a luxury perfume ad shows a sophisticated, well-traveled woman in a minimalist Paris apartment, it’s implicitly constructing a consumer identity – and inviting real viewers to see themselves in that image.

The sponsorial consumer 🔗

Before any ad ever reaches the public, it passes through an important internal gatekeeper. The sponsorial consumers are the decision-makers at the sponsor’s company or organization – the gatekeepers who decide if the ad will run or not. This is the marketing team, the legal department, the brand manager. They are technically an “audience” for the ad before it is ever published or broadcast. Their approval shapes what consumers ultimately see, making them a critical but often overlooked layer in advertising communication.

The actual consumer 🔗

Finally, there are the actual consumers – the real people in the real world who constitute the ad’s target audience. Actual consumers do not usually think or behave the same as the implied consumer, or even the sponsorial consumer. Thus, the advertiser and the creative team must be concerned about how the actual consumer will decode, or interpret, the message. This is where audience research, demographic targeting, and psychographic profiling become essential. A message that resonates with an implied consumer might completely miss the mark with an actual one.

The source and message are also multidimensional 🔗

Understanding receivers doesn’t happen in isolation – it requires understanding the full communication system. In Stern’s model, the source of an ad is not just “the brand.” It operates across three levels: the sponsor (the company legally responsible for the ad), the author (the copywriters and creative team who craft the message), and the persona (the voice or character that speaks to the audience within the ad). Each layer has its own agenda, and each shapes how the message is constructed and received.

Similarly, advertising messages are typically multidimensional, using one or a blend of three literary forms: autobiography, narrative, or drama. An autobiographical ad has a first-person voice sharing a personal experience. A narrative ad has a third-person storyteller. A dramatic ad places characters directly in front of an audience, who watches events unfold. The choice of form is a strategic decision that directly affects how different audiences will engage with the content.

How receivers actually process advertising: the Elaboration Likelihood Model 🔗

Stern’s model tells us who the receiver is. The Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), developed by psychologists Richard E. Petty and John T. Cacioppo in the early 1980s, tells us how receivers process the messages they encounter. It is now one of the most widely cited frameworks in advertising and persuasion research.

The ELM is built on a single foundational insight: not all audiences engage with advertising in the same way, and the depth of that engagement determines how durable any resulting attitude change will be. The model introduces the concept of elaboration – the degree of cognitive effort a person invests in evaluating a persuasive message. According to the elaboration likelihood model, people can have either high or low levels of elaboration – the extent to which they are willing and able to scrutinize an argument.

The central route: high-involvement processing 🔗

When an audience member is motivated and able to carefully evaluate an ad’s content, they process it through the central route. This involves active, logical engagement with the argument. The receiver weighs evidence, considers the product’s merits, compares it to alternatives, and forms an opinion based on the strength of the case being made.

For high-involvement products – such as cars, insurance, or major appliances – advertisers typically use the central route, presenting detailed specifications, comparative data, and logical reasons to choose their brand. The assumption is that when consumers are making significant financial or personal decisions, they are motivated to think carefully. Attitudes formed through the central route tend to be more durable and resistant to counter-persuasion because they are deeply connected to the consumer’s own reasoning.

The peripheral route: low-involvement processing 🔗

When a receiver lacks the motivation or ability to engage deeply with a message – perhaps because the topic seems irrelevant to them, or they’re distracted – they fall back on the peripheral route. Here, attitude change is driven not by argument quality but by surface-level cues: celebrity endorsements, attractive visuals, catchy music, or brand prestige.

For low-involvement products – snacks, soft drinks, everyday cosmetics – the peripheral route dominates. Advertisers lean on visual appeal, brand recognition, celebrity association, and emotional warmth rather than factual argument. A beer brand that links itself to sports, friendship, and good times is using peripheral persuasion – it’s not making a logical argument for why its beer is chemically superior; it’s creating an emotional shorthand.

A classic example of the peripheral route is product placement. The audience may not even consciously notice the persuasion attempt, as in the strategy of product placement – putting products with clear brand names in TV shows or movies to promote them.

Can both routes work together? 🔗

In practice, consumers don’t always fall neatly into one processing category or the other. Research suggests that in high-involvement advertising contexts, such as websites, central and peripheral processing routes may act together. A consumer researching a new laptop might carefully read technical specifications (central route) while also being influenced by the sleek design of the webpage and a reassuring five-star rating (peripheral cues). Advertisers who understand this can craft messages that work on both levels simultaneously.

Why route selection matters for targeting 🔗

The practical implication of the ELM for advertisers is significant: the route through which your target audience processes your message determines the kind of ad you should make. Getting this wrong is not a minor error – it means investing in an elaborate, argument-heavy campaign for an audience that will never engage with it at that level, or deploying a purely emotional ad for a consumer who wants data.

Personal relevance is one of the strongest predictors of which route a consumer takes. If a message directly concerns something important to the consumer – their health, finances, or values – they are far more likely to process it via the central route. This is why pharmaceutical advertising directed at patients often includes detailed clinical information, while the same brand might run emotionally driven, image-based ads for general audiences.

Source credibility also plays a role. Source credibility may help with well-considered purchases processed through central cues, while impulse purchases can be influenced by emotion-driven peripheral cues. An expert doctor recommending a supplement works for a health-conscious consumer doing research. A familiar face on a billboard works for a quick, low-stakes purchase decision.

Putting it together: from model to strategy 🔗

What Stern’s model and the ELM collectively reveal is that advertising communication is never a simple transmission from sender to receiver. The receiver is not a passive end-point – they are an active, layered participant whose identity, motivation, and cognitive engagement shape how a message lands. A well-designed advertising strategy accounts for this on every level.

It means knowing that your actual consumer may behave very differently from the idealized implied consumer your creative team imagined. It means recognizing that a gatekeeping sponsorial audience shapes what messages even reach the public. And it means understanding that the same target audience might engage with your ad via a completely different cognitive pathway depending on their level of involvement at that moment.

The ELM has become so central to advertising and marketing communications that it would be hard to find a marketing or advertising text that does not include it – a testament to how fundamental the concept of audience processing has become to the practice of advertising. Whether you’re planning a campaign for a high-ticket product that demands rational persuasion or a daily-use item that thrives on emotional recall, the question of how your audience receives your message is always the starting point.

What do you think? When you encounter an advertisement that genuinely changes your mind about a product, do you think you were persuaded through careful reasoning or through emotional and visual cues? And as advertising increasingly becomes personalized through digital platforms, does the distinction between implied consumers and actual consumers become easier or harder for brands to manage?

References

1. https://odp.library.tamu.edu/mediacommunication2e/chapter/advertising-functions-and-strategies/
2. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00913367.1994.10673438
3. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/A-revised-communication-model-for-advertising:-of-Stern/4b0e75ea2c5476e224a38a7e991aab14b7ec58f0
4. https://aef.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/arens_ch01.pdf
5. https://www.simplypsychology.org/elaboration-likelihood-model.html
6. https://psychology.town/advanced-social/elaboration-likelihood-model-pathways-persuasion/
7. https://content.one.lumenlearning.com/introductiontopsychology/chapter/10-2-4-learn-it-elaboration-and-persuasion/
8. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19445636/
9. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13527266.2022.2034033