The effectiveness of advertising appeals: A culturally-derived power perspective

Based on the perspective of culturally-derived power, we explore the influence of advertising appeals on attitudes towards advertisement, as well as their psychological mechanisms and boundary conditions through three experiments. The results indicate that individuals primed with personalized (vs. socialized) power have a better advertising attitude towards self-benefiting (vs. other-benefiting) appeal advertising via processing fluency. In addition, we find that consumption situations moderate the interaction effect between culturally-derived power and advertising appeals on advertising attitudes. The research findings enrich the theoretical research on advertising appeals and provide practical implications for companies to improve the effectiveness of their advertisements.     

Is television advertising being placed to reach product users?

Several textbooks, journal articles, and advertising practitioners indicate that the advertising for many products should be directed toward the heavy users of the product category. Other works suggest that advertising should be directed at current users of a brand to retain them or to users of competitive brands in an effort to attract them. The purpose of this article is to compare these directions for how advertising should be placed with data showing how advertising is being placed. The comparison is made using supermarket scanner panel data and household advertising exposure data. Examples are also provided to indicate the extent to which advertising could be targeted to heavy users of the product category and users of a brand, given the actual viewing and consumption patterns. Several implications for the placement of advertising are discussed.     

An epistemological odyssey: towards social construction of the advertising process

This paper seeks to describe the outcome of an intellectual journey from cognitivism to mutualism in advertising research. It frames this journey with a metaphor from Greek mythology as a means of foregrounding some of the major issues the journey entailed. In particular, a focus on myths, narratives and storytelling in discourse reminds us that the subtlety of meaning making in twentieth-century advertising may not be penetrated by the quasi-scientific myths we live by today. The paper attempts to elucidate a social constructionist approach in advertising research, locate it as a legitimate development in marketing theory, hint at aspects of the trajectory it took as a personal intellectual journey and, finally, illustrate some meta-theoretical research implications through reference to a research project which investigated the intra-agency advertising process.     

Advertising non-premium products as if they were premium: The impact of advertising up on advertising elasticity and brand equity

Non-premium brands occasionally emulate their premium counterparts by using ads that emphasize premium characteristics such as superior performance and exclusivity. We define this practice as “advertising up” and develop hypotheses about its short- and long-term impact on advertising elasticity and brand equity respectively. We test the hypotheses in two large-scale empirical studies using a comprehensive dataset from the automotive industry that includes, among others, the content of 2317 television ads broadcast over a period of 45?months. The results indicate that advertising up increases (decreases) short-term advertising elasticity for non-premium products with a low (high) market share. The results also show that an intensive use of advertising up over time leads to long-term improvements (reductions) in brand equity for expensive (cheap) non-premium products. Furthermore, an inconsistent use of advertising up leads to reductions in brand equity. The results imply that managers of non-premium products with a low market share can use advertising up to increase advertising effectiveness in the short run. However, advertising up will only generate long-term improvements in brand equity for expensive non-premium products. Finally, to avoid long-term reductions in brand equity, advertising up should be consistently used over time.     

复合型广告人才培养模式研究

本文从培养复合型广告人才的角度出发，通过对师资力量、专业设置、教学运行、广告组织等在培养复合型广告人才过程中的重要性的阐述，试图解决高校培养的广告人才难以满足业界需求的难题，并且指出了广告行业在复合型广告人才的培养过程中所应承担的责任。     

Advertising time expansion, compression, and cognitive processing influences on consumer acceptance of message and brand

This article examines the nature of consumer process involvement and cognitive processing of advertising content as mediating variables between commercial message executions (e.g., broadcast time compression and expansion and using broadcast versus print media) on attitude and behavioral intentions. The article proposes a framework that builds on the prior work of Krugman, Wright, and MacInnis and colleagues; the framework includes hypotheses of an advertising execution and processing involvement interaction effect on cognitive processing of commercial messages and a substantial direct effect of cognitive processing on attitude and behavioral intention. The article includes details of an experiment testing hypotheses in the framework. The findings provide strong support of the hypotheses. Implications for advertising strategy include adopting a conservative view on the use of time compression in advertising commercials and nurturing low consumer processing involvement of commercial messages.     

The effect of perceived advertising effort on brand perception: implication for retailers in Hong Kong

This paper examines how advertising effort, specifically advertising creativity and advertising believability, may influence consumers’ perceptions of a retailer’s business philosophy, and in turn consumers’ behavior toward retailers in Hong Kong. Altogether five hundred and eighty-three respondents (i.e. 320 college students and 263 shoppers) were surveyed. The results suggested that retailers that are regarded as having more creative advertising are perceived as being more learning-oriented, which leads to higher brand recognition. Meanwhile, retailers that are regarded as having more believable advertisements are perceived as having higher levels of integrity, and as a result are better recognized and more likely to be patronized. This research contributes to literature in retailing and marketing communication by establishing the antecedents and consequences of building a learning-oriented and trustworthy business philosophy in a cultural specific context. It also provides practical guidance for retailers who aim to increase brand recognition and purchase intentions through promotional effort.     

The return to advertising expenditure

Every year companies spend billions of dollars on advertising in an effort to induce consumers to purchase their goods. Yet, unlike almost any other investment that a company makes, management's advertising allocation decision is made with little, if any, substantive information on the return received from that investment. This research presents a methodology for determining the monetary gains from advertising and provides an estimate of the return to advertising investment for a sample of firms. Substantial gains exist for firms from advertising. This effect is seen to vary by type of industry and is strongly related to other positive strategic decisions of the firm.The authors would like to thank Deborah Heisley, two anonymous referees, and the participants at the 1991 Marketing Science Conference for their comments and suggestions. We thank Sylvia Graham, Camilo Riano, Patrick Grant, Patricia James, and Cordy Cates for assistance in gathering the information for this paper.     

When retailers and manufacturers advertise together; examining the effect of co-operative advertising on ad reach and memorability

Retailers often feature manufacturer brands in their advertising with the aim to drive sales for those brands and, at the same time, increase in-store traffic. The adoption of such co-operative advertising strategies should reach an expanded audience base comprising of store and brand buyers. Based on empirical evidence in non-retail settings, these buyers are more likely to remember the advertising than non-buyers. This usage-bias effect implies that co-operative advertisements achieve greater cut through than would be the case if either brand advertised alone. Our paper tests this hypothesis in the context of retailer advertisements that feature manufacturer brands in the US, UK and Australia. Our results confirm that a retail brand's shoppers are more likely to recall its advertisements than non-shoppers, extending the usage-bias generalisation to a retailing context. However, while co-operative advertising does expand the buyer-base reach, any uplift in ad-memorability is negated by a reduced ability for buyers of only one of the two brands to recall the advertisement. Information overload on cognitive processing is a possible explanation for this finding, and has implications for extracting value from any investment in co-operative advertising.     

Why the Generalized Bass Model leads to odd optimal advertising policies

We show that the optimal advertising strategy under the Generalized Bass Model (GBM) involves beginning at an extremely low level (the lower the better) and then increasing spending throughout the planning period. This strategy remains optimal in the presence of decreasing prices that affect both margins and diffusion speed. We provide a simple explanation for why this happens. We further show that the intuitively appealing patterns of continuous decrease or increase-then-decrease (both with an uptick towards the end) identified in earlier research are also possible as optimal dynamic advertising paths under the GBM structure, but only if the advertising at launch is constrained to be higher than a particular threshold, which we identify. The constraint necessary to generate intuitively appealing strategies lowers overall profits. Therefore, the GBM generates advertising policy recommendations that most marketers would deem odd. This casts doubt on the value of the GBM for normative purposes. Other existing diffusion models are preferred when seeking normative guidance on optimal dynamic advertising policies for new products subject to word of mouth.     

中国大陆广告伦理道德研究综述

广告具有经济和文化双重属性，它作为一种重要的商业手段的同时，也对大众的社会生活和价值观念等产生重大的影响甚至起导向作用。然而随着广告业在我国的逐渐发展繁荣，广告也出现了许多问题，逐渐引起社会各界的重视。本文回顾和反思我国广告伦理道德研究十几年来的研究现状，综述了广告伦理道德的相关成果，发现广告伦理道德研究的不足与缺陷，为我国未来广告伦理道德的研究提供依据，为中国广告业更好的发展提供一些建议。     

Decomposing the effect of advertising: What happens in the retail channel?

The diverging interests of manufacturers and retailers famously give rise to the double marginalization problem but have consequences far beyond pricing. Advertising is another marketing instrument that is under the control of the manufacturer but its ultimate effect on consumer demand also depends on retailers’ pricing decisions. We decompose the effect of advertising in the channel and highlight an additional route through which advertising affects sales, namely via the changes in the retail price that a strategic retailer makes in response to changes in demand following manufacturer advertising. The total demand effect of advertising thus comprises the direct effects of advertising on market shares, and the indirect effects coming through adjustments that the retailer makes to the in-store prices of all the brands in a given product category in response to the shifted demand due to advertising. We match advertising data for four different categories (both food and non-food) to store-level scanner panel data, which also include information on wholesale prices. Controlling for wholesale prices, we establish in a reduced-form model that the retailer reacts to manufacturer advertising by changing retail prices instead of simply imposing a constant markup on the wholesale price. To further explore the role of the strategic response of the retailer in a systematic fashion and quantify the effects derived in the decomposition, we estimate a discrete-choice model of demand and determine the magnitude of the direct and indirect effects. We find that the indirect effect of advertising through retailer prices is about half the size of the direct effect, and thus substantively affects advertising effectiveness.     

Advertising persuasion in China: Using Mandarin or Cantonese?

Advertising persuasion may differ based on different languages and/or dialects. Using Chinese samples, this study experimentally tests how a spokesperson's accents (standard Mandarin accent and local Cantonese accent) influence advertising persuasion across different product involvements (high- or low-involvement products) and different advertising appeals (rational or emotional ads). The results show that ads promoting high (low)-involvement products will produce higher persuasion when the ads use Mandarin (Cantonese) rather than Cantonese (Mandarin). In addition, ads with rational (emotional) appeals will result in higher persuasion when presented in Mandarin (Cantonese) rather than Cantonese (Mandarin). The findings contribute to a better understanding of an ad's persuasion with respect to a spokesperson's accents, and offer managerial implications for marketers doing advertising in a multilingual environment such as China.     

The effects of television commercial pacing on viewers' attention and memory

This study investigated the effects of advertising pacing (i.e. the number of visual cuts in an advertisement) on viewers' voluntary and involuntary attention to an advertisement, as well as its effects on the recall of claim-related and non-claim-related components of the advertisement. Using a limited capacity model of information processing/retrieval as its theoretical base and physiologically oriented measures of attention, this study provided some evidence that fast-paced advertisements (as compared to slower paced ones) may have a positive effect on viewers' involuntary (automatic) attention towards an advertisement, but have little differential effect on their voluntary attention. Furthermore, it appeared that the enhanced involuntary attention gained through the use of fast-paced advertisements comes in the form of attention directed towards the non-claim (advertisement executional) elements of an advertisement as opposed to the message-based (copy) elements of the advertisement. The practical and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Ad scepticism and retouch-free disclaimers: Are they worth it?

Abstract

The present study analyses the impact of ad scepticism on the way consumers perceive advertising and process its effects, and considers the influence of ad disclaimers. We conduct an experiment that explores three different contexts, namely (1) the total absence of ad disclaimers, (2) the presence of a retouch-free disclaimer and (3) the presence of a retouched disclaimer. By showing how ad scepticism fits in the advertising attitudinal approach, and how new digital developments affect consumers’ processing of advertisements, the results of this experiment can contribute to the marketing literature and clarify relevant topics for practitioners. This paper shows the significant influence played by ad believability and attitude towards the ad on behavioural intentions. This underlines, particularly for marketing practitioners, the importance of an ad’s believability and the credibility of its claims in the sales outcome. Most importantly, the framework offered by this paper shifts the attention towards the believability of advertising disclaimers aimed at clarifying the use of digitally enhanced images.     

An examination of measurement context effects in empirically based advertising research

The purpose of this research was to examine the issue of measurement context effects in advertising processing research. Based upon a review of the advertising processing literature and recent research focusingon measurement contexteffects, hypotheses were specified and empirically tested via a measurement context experiment. The results indicate that the cognitions measurement treatment procedures used in advertisement processing model tests produce small measurement context effects. However, these effects are not sufficiently severe to suggest a reinterpretation of previous findings or to result in drastic changes in future advertisement processing research methods. The results suggest the process of measuring respondents' attitudes towards advertisements did not result in statistically significant measurement context effects on the measures of attitudes towards brands or purchase intentions.     

The Advertising–price Relationship: Theory and Evidence

The relationship between advertising and price is important because the welfare effect of advertising depends upon the price effect of advertising. We attempt to provide a better understanding of the theoretical relationship between advertising and price. We establish theoretical conditions sufficient for advertising to raise prices. This will occur, for example, when firms play a supermodular game – a structure that considers the type of advertising (i.e., persuasive, image creating, or informative) and the effect that advertising has on a firm’s demand and costs. We also compare results from two simple duopoly models, one with horizontal and the other with vertical differentiation, and find that only the model with horizontal differentiation is supermodular for the forms of advertising that are thought to raise price (e.g., persuasive advertising). In consideration of these theoretical issues, we then develop an empirical model to determine whether advertising raises prices in the US brewing and cigarette industries.     

30年广告镜像:社会价值观念的嬗变(1979-2008)

本研究从中观层面入手,把中观层面的广告经营观变革分为五个阶段：产品力阶段（1979-1983）、文化力阶段（1984-1993）、媒介力阶段（1994-1997）、营销力阶段（1998-2003）和品牌力阶段（2004-2008）。在对广告界多位资深人士进行问卷调查和深度访问基础上,从中遴选出最具代表性的15个经典案例或事件。考察各阶段广告传播的微观波动——消费观,并从宏观角度寻找其与中观、微观律动的深层原因——时代观,以此管窥中国社会价值观念的变迁机制。     

中国高校学生对广告的认知、态度与使用

本文系“全国高校学生广告素养研究”项目系列研究成果之一,主要报告我们在大学生广告接触状况、广告卷入度状况、广告相关经历和广告满意度状况等方面的实证研究发现,从行为层面和心理层面,探讨中国高校学生对广告的认知、态度和使用问题,并总结在后续研究大学生广告素养特征和开展高校广告素养教育时应注意的问题。     

Dimensionality of advertising attitudes: cross-national insights

A consensus emerging from writings about attitudes towards advertising in general is that such attitudes consist of two dimensions: the social and economic effects. However, as is the case with other marketing concepts and propositions, the findings pertaining to the structure of advertising attitudes are primarily based on American research. This study investigates the dimensionality of advertising attitudes in a non-US setting. The results obtained from a survey of Saudi adult consumers suggest that advertising attitudes do indeed decompose into social and economic effects dimensions as espoused in the US-based literature. The measures developed to capture the two dimensions demonstrate satisfactory internal consistency reliability and pass the tests for convergent, discriminant and concurrent validity. The implications of the findings are discussed and suggestions for future research are provided.