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This paper examines the influence of advertising on how and what consumers learn from product experience. A hypothesis-testing framework is adopted where consumers treat advertisements as tentative hypotheses that can be tested through product experience. Two experiments were conducted using product categories that provided either ambiguous or unambiguous evidence about product quality. The first experiment showed that when consumers have access to unambiguous evidence, judgments of product quality are dependent only on the objective physical evidence and unaffected by advertising. However, advertising had dramatic effects on perceptions of quality when consumers saw ambiguous evidence; judgments and product inspection behavior protocols showed that advertising induced consumers to engage in confirmatory hypothesis testing and search. The second experiment showed that advertising influenced quality judgments by affecting the encoding of the physical evidence; retrieval of ad-consistent evidence also appeared to occur, though to a lesser degree. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The controversy over the factual content of advertising has traditionally been looked at from the point of view of the consumer, which is to say the "demand" side. This paper offers an original approach in that it adopts the advertiser's point of view, or the "supply" side. More specifically, it attempts to discover whether the advertiser believes in the effectiveness of factual content. An affirmative answer to this question is provided by means of an experiment showing that the perceived effectiveness of selected advertisements increases according to their factual content. The paper also makes a variety of basic observations concerning the professional behavior of advertisers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there is comparatively little money spent annually on industrial advertising, several studies have indicated its effectiveness and efficiency during the early stages of the industrial adoption process. This paper examines the comparative effectiveness of five promotional tools in the marketing of an undifferentiated industrial good. Within the cognitive--affective--conative adoption framework, this paper analyzes the role of both personal and non-personal media in the marketing communications process. The results of the study have application for both industrial advertising practitioners and communications researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Boletín de la Asociación de Geógrafos Españoles is the property of Asociacion de Geografos Espanoles and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

For this paper, the presence or absence of an absurd image was manipulated in a simulated print advertisement for a fictitious brand of wine cooler. Consumers' prior attitude toward wine coolers was hypothesized to moderate the effectiveness of absurdity in advertising. Consumers' cognitive responses were hypothesized to mediate the impact of absurdity and prior product category attitude on consumers' persuasion as measured by consumers' attitude to the ad and brand. The results supported the moderating role of prior product category attitude and a distraction hypothesis explanation of this effect. For subjects with negative prior attitude toward wine coolers, those viewing the absurd ad had a more positive attitude to the ad and brand than those viewing the non-absurd ad. However, for subjects with positive prior attitude toward wine coolers, those viewing the absurd ad did not differ in their ad or brand attitude than those viewing the non-absurd ad. The results also supported the mediating role of cognitive responses of these effects. Finally, absurdity was found to impact brand name recall in a manner that paralleled the results for the persuasion measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on the paper 'A Price Theoretic Approach to the Specification and Estimation of the Sales-Advertising Function,' by Vinod Verma, published in the July 1980 issue of the "Journal of Business." The methods employed in the paper follow the household production function approach to demand theory, wherein decision-making units are viewed as combining time inputs and market goods to produce unobserved, latent commodities that ultimately create value or utility. Verma's substantial contribution is to add information as another factor in the latent commodity production function. The outcome of the analysis is that advertising variables are arguments of the consumer's demand functions for market goods, in addition to the usual price and income variables. Advertising increases the endowment of a productive factor and hence makes purchased inputs of goods and time more productive in generating ultimate commodities. If advertising affects the demands confronting each producer, the optimal level of advertising for one firm cannot be independent of the amount of advertising undertaken by other firms.

Copyright of Revista de Administração is the property of Instituto de Administracao da FEA-USP and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

To what extent does the ethicality of an advertisement depend on the good or service being advertised? This question has engaged business ethicists for decades. Some say that an ad for something good is always good, while an ad for something bad is always bad. Others insist that advert-evaluation and product-appraisal are entirely independent of one another--the ethics of selling has nothing to do with what is being sold. In this paper I add another dimension to the debate. I do this not by offering an alternative answer to the question, but by inverting the questions itself. I ask: To what extent does our moral assessment of advertising influence our moral evaluation of particular products? I hope to show that one's general attitude towards advertising invariably colours one's appraisal of particular goods and services. If advertising is seen as a morally objectionable enterprise, products which may seem innocuous start to look not only useless, but baneful and corrupting. If advertising is seen as a morally, psychologically and socially valuable activity, the same innocuous products start to look fulfilling, enriching, and overall life-enhancing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that product and advertisement are neither completely dependent nor completely independent. The advertisement of a bad product cannot be good. The advertisement of a good product is not necessarily good. In the case where consumer sovereignty cannot be assumed, the goodness of an advertisement depends solely on the goodness of the product. In the case where consumer sovereignty can be assumed, the goodness of an advertisement depends first on whether the product is good, and if so, whether the advertisement preserves individual autonomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes the Beauty Match-Up Hypothesis, which has two main components: 1) That perceivers distinguish multiple types of physical attractiveness; and 2) That these specific types are seen as more or less suitable (i.e., better match-ups) for certain products when paired in advertising. A set of editors at major women's magazines sorted photos of professional fashion models. A multidimensional scaling analysis of these choices revealed six distinct types of good looks, and also identified prototypical fashion models who embodied these types. The beauty types were differentially associated with a set of perfumes and women's magazines representing diverse images. Implications of beauty types for product imagery in advertising are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents abstracts about industrial and consumer goods. They include "The Role of Exhibitions in Industrial Marketing - an Evaluation of the International Machine Tool Exhibition," by Donald W. Hendon and "The Market Outlook for Watches and Clocks" and "The Construction Machinery Industry - An Economic and Marketing Investigation," by William S. Penn.

Proprietary standardization seeks to increase a firm's market share (pie sharing). Open standardization seeks to increase the size of the market (pie expansion). In order to determine which of these creates more value for a firm involved in standardization, this paper investigates the market value of standardization initiatives, using an event study based on 148 XML schema standardization initiatives collected from the Lexis-Nexis database between January 1999 and December 2003. The results show that financial markets respond positively to announcements of proprietary XML schema standardization, but not to those of open XML schema standardization. Moreover, investors do not develop a preference for open standards over time. These results have implications for the management of standardization strategies and identify future research opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The application of software agents to facilitate on-line trading was an important initiative at the dawn of e-commerce, but researchers have not studied the effects of agent-to-human persuasion under different customer characteristics. This paper investigates the application of several persuasion and bargaining strategies to customers with different elaboration levels. Two experiments based on the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) were conducted in an on-line used-car-selling scenario. A software agent interacting with customers as a virtual salesperson adopted a persuasion strategy that was either relevant or irrelevant to product attributes and a bargaining strategy that was either tough or moderate. The results show that if the sales agent's strategies accord with the customer's characteristics, the customer's purchasing attitude can be changed and the seller's profit increased. This finding can be used as a guideline in designing sales agents for on-line sales activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Generic advertising promotes the general qualities of a product category and, therefore, benefits all firms- regardless of who has contributed to the campaign (e.g. "Got Milk?"). Such campaigns are organized either by independent contributions by industry members or through government legislation. In this paper, we study the relationship between brand and generic advertising in these two cases. In the independent-contribution case, a free-riding or cheap-riding generic advertising equilibrium is predicted. Interestingly, in the free-riding equilibrium, we show that dominant firms in industries should be indifferent to free riding by lesser firms. They should incur the entire industry advertising expense and be better for it. In the cheap-riding equilibrium, a group of equally dominant firms foot the bill. In the government-sponsored case, we establish that industry spending on generic advertising is greater. But, we find that there is an increase in total spending on brand advertising as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will argue that new product advertising does have a definable and special set of characteristics which sets it apart from advertising in general, both in terms of the theoretical effects it has on consumers and in terms of how consumers in actuality respond to it. This special profile of new product commercials leads to some general suggestions or guidelines on how best to maximize the impact of a new product's introductory advertising on the marketplace. A new product ad must create both awareness and buying interest starting from a zero base. A new product commercial must communicate large amounts of information. A new product ad benefits from inherent novelty and freshness. To understand whether consumers do in fact respond differently to advertising for new products, a large body of copy testing data on both new product ads and established product ads is examined.

A photomosaic is an image with two layers of visual information, including an overarching image that can be seen from a distance and a matrix of individual tile images when examined closely. This paper presents a method for generating photomosaics with an additional layer of quick response code (QR code) information that can be accessed by typical QR code scanners in cell phones. The basic idea is to carefully classify the tile images in different categories and generate the photomosaic patches by referring to the properties of QR code modules. Three levels of construction methods for generating the proposed photomosaics in different image resolutions are proposed. The results show that the generated photomosaics have good visual quality and high robustness for decoding the QR code. The proposed method endows conventional photomosaics with the QR code capability. It extends photomosaics from exhibiting purely visual information to the linkage of multimedia data. Furthermore, it increases the feasibility and potential of applying photomosaics in diverse applications, such as activity promotions or commercial product advertisements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents comments of the author on the paper "The Consumer's World: Place as Context" by Robert Sack. In a nutshell, Sack's paper says that, with reference to industrially-produced commodities, consumption can help generate real place as context, using materials from the three traditional sources of human action, namely nature, social relations and meaning. How this generation occurs can be seen clearly, he thinks, in advertisements. He goes on to say that the sense of place becomes fragmented in the modern world and he observes consuming mass-produced products can attempt to stay this fragmenting process and to some extent help us share and communicate a holistic sense of place as context.

EXPENDITURES ON RESEARCH AND EXPERImental development (R&D) and advertising by companies are forms of capital investment in intangible commodities as opposed to capital investment in tangible commodities such as plant and equipment. The amounts spent on both advertising (adspend) and R&D are positively related to the profitability of commercial enterprises. Various studies have recorded the links between R&D and adspend at the level of firms, sub-sectors and sectors of industry for particular countries. However, no analyses appear to have been published on the associations between these two kinds of investment either at national level or in international comparisons. The findings presented here indicate that the most-developed countries spend between two and six times more on R&D per capita than on advertising. In less R&D-intensive economies, however, adspend may equal or exceed R&D expenditure per capita. In four countries examined, that have the lowest investment in R&D as a percentage of GDP-namely South Africa, Greece,Portugal and Poland-adspend actually exceeds gross expenditure on R&D. I focus on the link between R&D and adspend in South Africa between 1989 and 2004, for which a highly significant correlation (r = 0.99) was found. I also examine international comparisons of reliable data and indicator series concerning these factors in 17 other countries between 1995 and 2004. In the majority of EU and other countries for which relevant advertising and R&D data were available, significant correlations were also found between these two variables. Because total advertising figures tend to be published within the first quarter of the following year, it may be possible to use these statistics to forecast national R&D expenditure. The benefits for businesses to continue investing in both advertising and R&D, even under adverse economic conditions, are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional wisdom suggests that one of the goals of manufacturer advertising is to reduce the cross-price elasticity between products (make one's own and rivals' products appear to be less substitutable in the eyes of consumers). Conventional wisdom also suggests that, all else being equal, retailers will be able to obtain better terms of trade from manufacturers the more substitutable are the manufacturers' products. It follows that retailers should be opposed to advertising that has the effect of reducing cross-price elasticities and thus that manufacturer advertising can be a source of channel conflict. We show that these conventional wisdoms need not hold when only some consumers are exposed to the advertising messages. Using a Hotelling model of demand, we show that (1) manufacturers can be worse off from advertising that reduces the cross-price elasticities between their products, (2) channel conflict need not arise, even when the sole purpose of advertising is to affect cross-price elasticities, and (3) depending on its bargaining power, a retailer can be better off when the manufacturers' products are perceived to be less substitutable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When selling a product line, a firm has to consider the costs of communicating about the different products to the consumers. This may affect the product line design in general, and which products or services are offered in particular. The problem is that firms have to communicate to consumers, possibly through advertising, to make them consider buying the products that firms are selling. This results in the firm offering a smaller number of products than is optimal when advertising has no costs. This effect is greater the extent of consumer confusion about the advertising messages, and is reduced by a greater ability to target advertising. When offering vertically differentiated products (second-degree price discrimination), under general conditions it is optimal to advertise so that one has a greater proportion of sales of a lower-quality product than if advertising had no cost. This situation also allows the firm to charge a lower price for the high-quality product and offer a higher quality of the low-quality product than it would if advertising were without cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tobacco cessation programs have had their share of hits and misses. While state-controlled organizations invest in such programs every year, it is hard to trace their effectiveness. This is a bigger challenge when celebrities are enrolled to endorse such programs. Several studies that track celebrity endorsements for marketing commercial products have validated the influence of celebrities on brand-related outcomes. This study provides a systematic review of a celebrity endorsement of an anti-tobacco advertisement. To conduct a systematic review of a celebrity endorsement, we examined the responses of celebrity fans on source (celebrity) credibility factors and their attitude towards the social cause endorsement. A sample of 258 celebrity fans was surveyed using a questionnaire. The survey instrument contained a 15-item scale to measure celebrity factors of physical attractiveness, expertise and trustworthiness. Further, demographic details, social media activity and cigarette consumption details were captured along with cognitive and affective responses towards the anti-tobacco endorsement featuring the celebrity. It was found that physical attractiveness and trustworthiness of the celebrity were found to be influencing the attitude of the fan towards social cause. In addition, the study revealed the significant influence of education on attitude towards social cause in contrast to age and gender as evident in previous studies. The study provides very important insights for advertisers of social causes on effective use of celebrities as part of their communication campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper offers a comparative analysis of different ways to sell products (selling formats) when buyers incur evaluation costs Since these costs are sunk at the moment of trade, buyers may refrain from incurring them for fear of later opportunism on the part of sellers. It is found that the use of many common selling formats can be explained in terms of their ability to alleviate this problem. Specifically, I explain price advertising, seller colocation, and bargaining. The theory explains much of the divergence in retail trading institutions and leads to several testable predictions. (Game Theory; Retailing; Advertising) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effects of advertising on the sales growth of new, infrequently purchased products. It is assumed that producer originated advertising serves to inform innovators of the existence and value of the new product while word-of-mouth communication by previous adopters affects imitators. Such a diffusion process is modeled and tested for the case of telephonic banking. It is shown that advertising accelerates the diffusion process of the new product. The implications for a firm introducing a new product and wishing to maximize its discounted profits over the product's life cycle are discussed. In particular, it is demonstrated that the optimal advertising policy is to advertise heavily when the product is introduced and to reduce the level of advertising as sales increase and the product moves through its life cycle. Evidence that such a strategy is commonly practiced by firms is cited. (Diffusion of Innovations; New Products; Optimal Advertising) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this paper is to analyze the consumer's decision in electing to use cents-off coupons distributed by manufacturers of consumer products. Arguing that the decision to use coupons is based on the tradeoff between costs of using coupons and the savings obtained, it is shown that coupons can serve as a price discrimination device to provide a lower price to a particular segment of consumers. Based on a price theoretic model, it is shown that the users of coupons are more price elastic than nonusers of coupons and that the opportunity cost of time and other household resource variables are determinant factors in consumers' decisions. Implications derived from the model are tested using diary panel data. (Price-Discrimination; Cents-Off Coupons; Theory Testing) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Communication & Society is the property of Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Navarra, S.A. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The authors present the results of two studies that show how consumers' evaluations of an advertised product can be influenced by the compatibility or conflict between the regulatory goals (promotion or prevention) addressed by the product and prior advertising of related products. Participants across both studies were exposed sequentially to the advertising of two products (prime and target), and they demonstrated a regulatory goal fluency effect in their evaluations of the target brand. When the regulatory goal serviced by the target matched (conflicted with) the regulatory goal serviced by the prime, participants indicated higher (lower) purchase intent (Experiment 1) and more favorable evaluations of the target brand (Experiment 2). These effects were not accounted for by differences in participants' involvement or affective state across the conditions. Instead, mediation analyses show that participants' ease of processing the target advertisement underlies the effect of goal compatibility on brand evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consumers are assumed to organize information about lifestyle groups much like they organize other category knowledge, in that features of the object are used by the consumer to assign it to a category. Knowledge about the complementary consumption choices--consumption constellations--associated with different lifestyles is hypothesized to be organized in associative networks. A consumption constellation is a hypothetical construct used to describe the cognitive organization of cross-category product information. This study examines several processing alternatives pertaining to consumption constellations using response latency methodology. Participants were asked to respond to stimuli (products) representative of either an aspirational or an avoidance group consumption constellation. Results suggest that, at least for products defining an aspirational lifestyle, consumption constellations exist as constructs in memory. The findings support the value of adapting cognitive processing methodologies to understand better how consumers perceive the symbolic meanings of products. The article concludes with a call for additional research and a discussion of the ramifications for advertising strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study tested in the context of branded products a set of hypotheses derived from theory in political science concerning negative advertising messages: those that unfavorably compare Brand B with Brand A. We expected and found that the most favorably-rated message contains negative elements, and that any negative comparison is perceived differently by users of Brand B, users of A, users of a third brand and users of multiple brands. Two other expectations were also supported. Responses are more favorable to a message simply denigrating product features of a rival brand vs. a message smearing a corporation. Also, all ratings do not differ in the same way when one contrasts responses to negative comparative messages with responses to messages that are simply brand comparisons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through three studies we demonstrate that contextually detailed ads are facilitative in enhancing brand attitudes and intentions under anticipatory self-referencing, whereas ads stripped of contextual detail are facilitative in enhancing brand attitudes and intentions under retrospective self-referencing. We find that when minimal ad information is provided, self-related thoughts about the past contain more contextual information than self-related thoughts about the future. In study 1, we find that when consumers engage in retrospective self-referencing, providing more contextual information in the ad increases the incidence of self-related thoughts that are discordant with the advertised brand (hereafter, "self-brand discordant thoughts"), decreases self-related thoughts that are concordant with the advertised brand (hereafter, "self-brand concordant thoughts"), and decreases brand attitudes and behavioral intentions. Conversely, when consumers engage in anticipatory self-referencing, providing more contextual information in the ad increases the incidence of contextually detailed thoughts, increases the ability to form consumption visions, increases the incidence of self-brand concordant thoughts without affecting self-brand discordant thoughts, and increases ad and brand attitudes and behavioral intentions. Mediation tests suggest that the effects on brand evaluations are mediated both by the extent to which consumers form brand-related consumption visions and by the extent to which they can link themselves to the advertised brand through concordant thoughts. In study 2 we show that the demonstrated differences between retrospection and anticipation are predicated on self-referencing and are not obtained for other referencing. Together, the results indicate that it is important to account both for the presence of self-referencing and for the variations in the nature of self-referencing encouraged by the ad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The advertising literature contains some evidence that offensive advertising is multidimensional in nature, but little is known about the character of these dimensions. In an exploratory study of TV advertising, two different dimensions of "offensive" were identified. These dimensions were labeled Offensive Products and Offensive Execution. This distinction is important both for the study of the construct as well as for advertisers who are faced with decisions on advertising execution. The Offensive Products dimension contains those products related to consumer problems which social norms dictate should not be discussed in public. The Offensive Execution dimension, the dimension over which the advertiser has more control, consists of those ads which are perceived to be offensive by the nature of the execution or themes and/or topics of the ad and not the product itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Involvement is conceptualized as a state variable with two components, intensity and direction. Intensity is associated with the amount of attention devoted to an ad and direction is represented by the type of strategy used to process the information. An experiment contrasts two strategies, one with brand evaluation as its goal (high involvement) and one that inhibits brand evaluation (low involvement). The low involvement (nonbrand) strategy yielded inferior memory for brand information but a more positive attitude toward the brand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Experiments reported in psychological journals demonstrate that recall is materially improved if a question is asked before information is presented. The finding is robust and holds for many different kinds of questions presented in various ways on diverse topics. This article presents experimental evidence that questions can lead to heightened recall of the brand names of advertised products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Product safety has become a major problem for businessmen, consumers and the government. While advertising does not directly contribute to all product related accidents, it does, inadvertently, have the power to promote unsafe behavior. Used in the right manner advertising can have a positive influence on the safety behavior of consumers. This article reviews the role of advertising in product safety and presents some guidelines for product advertising policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines one of the most controversial issues in marketing, "Does advertising increase prices?" It reviews arguments and empirical research published on both sides and concludes that an approach which distinguishes factory from consumer prices, and relative from absolute prices, can reconcile much of what has been considered conflicting evidence on this question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors examine the history of brand management by tracing its development in the context of the marketing environment from 1870 to the present. They develop six theses regarding the evolution of brand management and its implications and substantiate them utilizing a historical approach. They demonstrate that the brand manager system originated well after the leadership of branded products was established, it was adopted following a conventional adoption curve pattern, and it has proven quite adaptable to differing firm and marketing environments over the past several decades. They then evaluate its likely fate in today's rapidly changing environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recognition has not received extensive acceptance by practitioners as a response variable for learning of television commercials. The authors review some of the distinctions between recoil and recognition, and some of the problems associated with each. In a laboratory experiment they developed and tested a measure of recognition useful for low involvement situations in which a recall level of learning may not be necessary. Data and implications about the usefulness and limitations of the measure are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although empirical evidence shows that advertising wears out over time and that advertising pulsation may be superior to a strategy of constant spending, current advertising models neither represent the wearout phenomenon nor consider pulsation as an optimal strategy. In this article, the wearout phenomenon is represented in a model which distinguishes between level stimuli and differential stimuli of advertising. The model is applied to several brands, and both advertising stimuli are found to be significant. A pulsation strategy is shown to be optimal under both an unconstrained and a constrained advertising budget. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examination of the process by which consumers form decision criteria and subsequently evaluate and choose product-level alternatives when purchase goals are well defined indicates that decision criteria are formulated in a goal-driven, top-down fashion rather than a product-driven, bottom-up fashion. Evaluation of alternatives follows a within-product strategy, as opposed to a within-attribute strategy, and is characterized by less reliance on price information than reported in previous research. Even without a specific goal for product decisions, the formation and utilization of decision criteria did not follow the bottom-up process. Alternative explanations are offered for these contrasts along with implications for future research on product-level decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attitudes toward a number of products and the accessibility of those attitudes as indicated by the latency of response to an attitudinal inquiry were assessed. Subjects with highly accessible attitudes toward a given product displayed greater attitude-behavior correspondence than did those with relatively less accessible attitudes. Furthermore, subjects with less accessible attitudes displayed more sensitivity to the salience afforded a product by its position in the front row, as opposed to the back row, than did subjects with more accessible attitudes. The implications of these data for a model of the process by which attitudes guide behavior are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study examines the impact of encoding of product information on temporal changes in product attitudes following exposure to discounting appeals. The sleeper effect, which is manifested by increased message effectiveness over time, was observed in two replications when participants were induced to encode the message elaboratively. Under this condition, consumers were guided to imagine themselves consuming the advertised products while viewing the ads. The sleeper effect was not observed, however, when consumers were not induced to elaborate on and integrate message information (Experiment 1) or when the request to imagine themselves using the products was delivered after the discounting cue was conveyed (Experiment 2). These findings support a model that postulates that the magnitude of the sleeper effect is influenced by the relative availability of the product information and the discounting cue appeal. Additional mediating mechanisms are explored and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that affective responses (ARs) should supplement the cognitive responses more often studied in communication research. ARs are not evaluative responses to an advertisement, but represent the moods and feelings evoked by the ad. The literature on ARs is reviewed, and a typology for such responses is presented. Three ARs are studied empirically; they appear to be antecedents of the attitude towards the ad (A) and to have a weak but significant impact on brand attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural meaning in a consumer society moves ceaselessly from one location to another. In the usual trajectory, cultural meaning moves first from the culturally constituted world to consumer goods and then from these goods to the individual consumer. Several instruments are responsible for this movement: advertising, the fashion system, and four consumption rituals. This article analyzes the movement of cultural meaning theoretically, showing both where cultural meaning is resident in the contemporary North American consumer system and the means by which this meaning is transferred from one location in this system to another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the rise in outdoor advertising and the commercialization of public space in the U.S. The author discusses the fast proliferation of billboards and other forms of outdoor advertising that has transformed the city streetscape[øâ6]. She examines the debate over this controversy and provides historical background to clarify the argument. She also investigates the efforts of outdoor advertisers to legitimize their businesses.

Advertising is one of the key marketing tools managers have at their disposal to influence their customers into purchasing a new product. The overall objective of new product advertising is to inform and persuade customers. Drawing up an advertising plan for a new product that is under the influence of diffusion phenomenon is not an easy task. Hence, research in this area is very limited. In our research, we use an empirically proven diffusion demand function that explicitly incorporates the advertising component. Our results suggest that optimal advertising is determined by the advertising effectiveness, discount rate, and the ratio of advertisement to profits. Depending upon the interplay among these factors, the optimal advertising takes decrease-increase, increase-decrease, monotonically increasing or monotonically decreasing shape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Successful corporate branding requires that questions related to communication, publicity, and organizational structures are addressed. An uncritical adoption of approaches known from traditional product branding will inevitably give problems as the properties of tangible commodities and services with their relatively concrete dimensions are absent when the main question is one of values. Furthermore, when the relatively straightforward identification and power structures of corporations and consumers are replaced by the more diversified structures of city government, their populations, and potential visitors, problems seem to multiply in what has become known as city branding. This analysis of the communicational aspects of two Danish provincial towns' branding efforts examines both their internally and externally directed communication. It demonstrates that an insufficient understanding of - or willingness to face - these differences will inevitably hamper such branding efforts because of the consequential inconsistencies. Finally, paths to more effective city branding are indicated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the interaction between capital structure and advertising competition. Using a sample of firms that raise significant amounts of capital, we find that firms whose financial leverage has decreased as a result of their new funding increase their advertising significantly more than firms whose leverage has increased. We also find that these firms' industry rivals respond less aggressively with their own advertising when they have more debt in their capital structure. Overall, our results support the view that financial leverage has a "dampening" effect on the intensity with which a firm chooses to compete in the product market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research examined the relation between self-relevance and word-of-mouth (WOM). The results of two studies suggest consumers are more likely to provide WOM for products that are relevant to self-concept than for more utilitarian products. There was also some indication that WOM was biased, in the sense that consumers exaggerated the benefits of self-relevant products compared to utilitarian products. Finally, self-relevance had a greater impact on WOM in individualist cultures than collectivist cultures, consistent with differences in the way self-concept is typically construed by these groups. Implications for marketing strategies concerning WOM are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brand value has become an important corporate performance metric, as can be observed from the close following of the annual Top 100 Brand Values ranked by brand consultancy firm Interbrand and reported in Business Week. In this study, we employ a simultaneous equations model to examine the non-linear influence of lagged advertising, marketing promotions and R&D expenses on brand value after controlling for net income and lagged brand valuation. We infer that these lagged expenses yield diminishing returns to brand value. The effect of R&D expense is the weakest, possibly because it is confounded with the advertising and promotional effects. Differences across industry segments or country base are not statistically significant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shopping engines of different designs were researched in respect to convenience as a mode of access to goods and services offered on the Web. Some shopping engines function autonomously in one stage, quickly maximizing decision accuracy as a function of several parameters. Others strongly involve the user, searching in multiple stages to satisfy decision accuracy requirements. Single-stage and multiple-stage shopping engines designed with two approaches, QuickSearch and AdaptiveSearch, were tested on 205 users trying to attain maximal accuracy with minimal effort. The best-performing shopping engine used two stages, QuickSearch first, then AdaptiveSearch. The results imply that QuickSearch and AdaptiveSearch, although logically equivalent, have different impacts on shopping for differentiated, multi-attribute goods and services. This suggests that shopping engines should be designed to first save the shopper effort and then provide attribute-focused support for examining the resulting set of items. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]