Subject-anticipated versus experimentally-derived measures of influence: Advertising implications

Three representative communication sources were selected from thirteen pictured sources using hierarchical grouping analysis. Slides of the three sources were shown sequentially to a sample of 192 male undergraduate business students, who were asked to indicate their perception of each in terms of twenty-one image and two anticipated influence (believability and convincingness) scales arrayed in five-point semantic differential format. Subjects then indicated their extent of agreement with one of three prescaled statements concerning commercial airlines randomly attributed to each source (experimentally-determined measure of influence). Anticipated and objective influence were found to vary across sources. The relative effectiveness of the three sources was found to differ when subject-anticipated and experimentally-determined influence measures were used.