Product Packaging Metaphors: Effects of Ambiguity and Explanatory Information on Consumer Appreciation and Brand Perception

Product packaging is an important means for communicating product and brand benefits. Research suggests that visual metaphors may be particularly suited in this context, however, the conditions under which metaphors are effective are not yet well understood. In the research reported herein, effects of metaphor ambiguity and explanatory information on consumer appreciation and brand personality perceptions are tested. Study 1 shows that explicit information explaining the metaphor increases consumer appreciation and positively affects brand perception, but only for ambiguous metaphors. Study 2 shows that drawing consumer attention to packaging design by means of a visual packaging cue may be equally or even more effective for enhancing consumer appreciation and steering brand personality perceptions. In addition, Study 2 shows that effects of explanatory information and information type vary with participants’ readiness to engage in metaphor processing. Together, the results provide greater insight into the effects of metaphors in product design and provide guidelines to packaging designers.     

Perception of Naturalness of Food Packaging and Its Role in Consumer Product Evaluation

The aim of this article is to understand the concept of food “naturalness,” as it is perceived by the consumer via the packaging. The research is based on a qualitative study from which three types of experimental packaging were constructed (emotional, functional, and mixed) and a quantitative study carried out on 163 French consumers. The research identified two dimensions of food naturalness and related them to credibility, attractiveness, quality, and purchase intention, with differences according to the three types of packaging tested. The highlighting of their role in the perception of the naturalness of a food product should help managers to avoid overexposure of the concept.     

Index of Consumer Expectations: Food Price Effects and Durable Goods Expenditures

The Index of Consumer Expectations (ICE), which includes expenditures on durable goods, has been adopted as a leading indicator of national economic activity. A rational expectations model of the ICE was developed and the economic determinants of consumers' expectations were estimated. Aggregate expenditures on durable goods were explained by an endogenous ICE and sentiment about current economic conditions. Consumers were more likely to purchase durable goods when they felt better off in the current period relative to the future.     

Price Font Disfluency: Anchoring Effects on Future Price Expectations

Novel, unique, or otherwise disfluent fonts are often used to draw consumer attention. However, disfluent fonts may also create metacognitive processing challenges. Therefore, consumers may devote more cognitive resources to process disfluent price fonts and will consequently be more likely to accurately recall and anchor on disfluent price displays when forming their future price expectations. Three experiments demonstrate that disfluent sale prices can reduce future price expectations, while disfluent manufacturer-suggested retail prices (MSRPs) can increase future price expectations. Additionally, price recall accuracy mediates the effect. Moderation analysis demonstrates that disfluent MSRP displays are more likely to affect price-conscious and less-involved consumers.     

Consumer Purchase Intentions and Perceptions of Product Quality and National Advertising

The relationship between consumer perceptions of brand quality and the level of national advertising is examined using 93 subjects for three brands of peanut butters. The association between these perceptions and purchase intentions is also reported. Results suggest that a strong link between quality and national advertising exists in the minds of consumers. Subjects associated peanut butter brand quality with the perceived level of national advertising. Additionally, purchase intentions were positively correlated with perceptions of brand quality.     

Extrinsic Cues and Consumer Judgments of Food Product Introductions: The Case of Pangasius in Norway

In this article, the authors explore how the extrinsic cues corporate social responsibility, endorsement, and country of origin affect consumer evaluations of product quality, value, and expected product popularity for frozen Pangasius filets, a farmed fish product just recently introduced into the Norwegian market. The effects of these three variables are tested on purchase intentions. By means of a 2?×?2?×?2 factorial experiment in combination with survey data, the authors find that the three extrinsic cues under study had different effects on the evaluative variables. Furthermore, these variables all had positive and significant effects on purchase intentions. Hence, the general conclusion is that importers of new food products like Pangasius can benefit from focusing on extrinsic cues when the intrinsic cues are hard to evaluate or are unknown. Through the indirect effect on purchase intentions, extrinsic cues play an important role when consumers judge unfamiliar and new products.     

Knowledge Effects on Curiosity and New Product Advertising

Abstract

Advertisers commonly advocate when writing ad copy, “Keep it simple!” In keeping with this belief, ads are typically written at less than the tenth grade level. The authors assert that this view may be too simple in view of the complex processes underlying cognitive processing. In an experiment where print ads did not vary in terms of their concreteness, the authors found that increasing levels of readability made no differences in recall, attitudinal judgments or purchase intent.     

基于多参考点的消费者价格公平感知和产品定价研究

价格公平感知是消费者做出购买决策时的重要影响因素。由四个维度组成的参考体系为产品历史价格、不同地区该产品价格、竞争产品价格和产品成本估计等,基于该参考体系消费者价格公平感知的形成及其对产品需求的影响,为产品定价提供新思路。     

Effects of Consumer Weight Level and Advertising Appeals on Consumer Attitude Toward Food and Advertisements

This study examines the link between consumer weight level, food type, and consumer attitude toward both food and food advertisements. Further, this research explores how food advertisements containing emotional or informational claims influence the attitudes of overweight and normal-weight consumers. Two experiments were conducted to study the interaction between weight levels, food types (meat vs. vegetables), and advertising appeals (emotional vs. informational). The results showed mixed support for the six hypotheses. The findings indicate that consumer weight level interacts with food types, and emotional/information appeals affecting food evaluation and attitudes toward food advertisements. Managerial implications for food manufacturers and advertisers are discussed.     

Consumer Goods Packaging Innovation and its Role in the Product Adoption Process

Packaging has emerged as an important competitive tool. An innovative package can pre-empt a market position, create a new market and lead to greater sales and profits, just as an improved or reformulated product can. This report investigates the adoption process for packaging innovations in food and food-related items. It seeks to answer certain questions pertaining to the adoption process: Do early adopters differ from the general population? What factors serve to accelerate the rate of adoption of packing innovations by consumers? What kinds of packinging innovations become successes? The results of a small-scale empirical study comparing early adopters of packaging innovations with the general populations provide some answers to these questions. The report concludes with recommendations to management for successful innovative packaging.     

Effects of Word of Mouth Advertising on Consumer Risk Taking

The role of word of mouth advertising on modifying consumers' willingness to make risky product choices is analyzed. The authors present an information and perceived risk processing model of word of mouth advertising's influence on consumer behavior. Implications for advertising management are suggested.     

Media and Price Disclosure Effects in Legal Service Advertising

No abstract available for this article.     

An Experimental Study of Cognitive Dissonance,Product Involvement,Expectations, Performance and Consumer Judgement of Product Performance

Abstract

This experimental study investigates the effects of cognitive dissonance, expectations, and product performance on product evaluations. The study improves upon the methodological problems of the past experimental studies. The results of a 2×2×2 factorial design suggest that product involvement acts as a moderator in the postdecisional product evaluation process. The theoretical and empirical findings suggest communication guidelines for the advertisers.     

消费者心理特征对新产品购买的影响作用研究

消费者新产品购买意向对企业新产品开发和营销策划具有重要参考价值。在理论探讨和实证研究基础上 ,从消费者行为特征和产品特征两个方面 ,分析了新产品购买意向的主要影响因素和新产品购买意向强弱程度不同的消费者群体的主要特征。此外对新产品的营销策划提出了一些建议。     

Price Elasticity Dynamics over the Product Life Cycle: A Study of Consumer Durables

Extending the work of Parker (1992), which considers only firstpurchases, and Simon (1989), which considers brand-level sales, weempirically provide support for the hypothesis that total categorysales price elasticities first decease in absolute value but thenultimately increase if the product in question faces the decline phaseof the product life cycle (due to competitive substitutes, changes intastes, and so on). As an interesting artifact of the methodology, thearticle also shows how the Bass model can be easily modified to accountfor total category sales (first plus repeat purchases) and that, in thelimit, the Bass model converges to stochastic repeat purchase models(bridging two radically different modeling traditions). If unadjusted,the Bass model applied to sales data is grossly misspecified when thetime series studied exceeds five to ten years for consumer durables.     

The Effects of Identical Versus Varied Advertising and Publicity Messages on Consumer Response

A trend in images and messages that eventually cause offence was noted among significant international advertisers, accompanied by a steady increase in formal complaints over a 6-year period in the UK. Though the numbers are at present small, reanalysis of large-scale industry research reports suggested they are the tip of an iceberg consisting of many million potential complainants. If this latent activism reaches a critical mass, it will become a phenomenon that planners can no longer afford to ignore. Meanwhile, the literature on complaining behaviour has concentrated on the causes and responses rather than on the sources. Therefore, this study applied geographic and psychographic analysis techniques to postcodes accompanying over 50 000 complaints to the two main regulatory bodies in the UK, which were hitherto unavailable to independent researchers. A resulting index of complaints by location confirmed the intuitively logical assumption that it is characteristic of London and the south of England. A profile of the complainants showed that they typically belong to a distinctive and relatively homogeneous social group of potential opinion leaders. Together, these outputs provide an original and unique template for minimizing the risk of longterm negative effects due to accidental provocation of an unintended audience. This is a media-strategy solution; the alternative would of course be to abandon potentially controversial creative strategies.     

The Effects of Animation and Format on the Perception and Memory of Online Advertising

Based on a general framework of consumer perception and processing of advertising, this study examines the impact of animation and ad format on the attention and memorization of online ads. Consumer attention to a variety of real-world ads was measured with eye tracking and ad memory was assessed with recognition and recall tests. The results suggest that on average, animation had little or no effect on attention. We did nevertheless observe a strong interaction effect between animation and ad format, which suggests that the effect of animation is conditioned by ad format. Animation has a positive effect on attention to skyscrapers, but a negative one on attention to banners. As to memorization, animation improved recognition effects, but mainly for banners. Surprisingly, consumers could recognize ads without having looked at them, which suggests that online consumers are especially parsimonious in allocating their focal attention and memory resources to irrelevant ads when they are involved in other tasks.     

Advertising and Word-of-Mouth Effects on Pre-launch Consumer Interest and Initial Sales of Experience Products

This study examines how consumers' interest in a new experience product develops as a result of advertising and word-of-mouth activities during the pre-launch period. The empirical settings are the U.S. motion picture and video game industries. The focal variables include weekly ad spend, blog volume, online search volume during pre-launch periods, opening-week sales, and product characteristics. We treat pre-launch search volume of keywords as a measure of pre-launch consumer interest in the related product. To identify probable persistent effects among the pre-launch time-series variables, we apply a vector autoregressive modeling approach. We find that blog postings have permanent, trend-setting effects on pre-launch consumer interest in a new product, while advertising has only temporary effects. In the U.S. motion picture industry, the four-week cumulative elasticity of pre-launch consumer interest is 0.187 to advertising and 0.635 to blog postings. In the U.S. video game industry, the elasticities are 0.093 and 1.306, respectively. We also find long-run co-evolution between blog and search volume, which suggests that consumers' interest in the upcoming product cannot grow without bounds for a given level of blog volume.     

Environmental and Economic Dimensions of Sustainability and Price Effects on Consumer Responses

The lack of attention to sustainability, as a concept with multiple dimensions, has presented a developmental gap in green marketing literature, sustainability, and marketing literature for decades. Based on the established premise of customer–corporate (C–C) identification, in which consumers respond favorably to companies with corporate social responsibility initiatives that they identify with, we propose that consumers would respond similarly to companies with sustainability initiatives. We postulate that consumers care about protecting and preserving favorable economic environments (an economic dimension of sustainability) as much as they care about natural environments. Thus, we investigate how two sustainability dimensions (i.e., environmental and economic) and price can influence consumer responses. Using an experimental method, we demonstrate that consumers favor sustainability in both dimensions by giving positive evaluations of the company and purchase intent. In addition, consumers respond more negatively to poor company sustainability than to high company sustainability. In comparison, consumers respond more negatively to the company’s poor commitment to caring for the environment than to the company’s poor commitment to economic sustainability. We also find that consumers do not respond favorably to low prices when they have information about the firm’s poor environmental sustainability. Finally, we find support for an interaction effect between consumer support for sustainability and corporate sustainability; that is, consumers evaluate a company more favorably if the company shares the consumers’ social causes. Overall, we conclude, from our empirical study, support for the idea that consumers do respond to multiple dimensions of sustainability.