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Publicity is assumed to have higher credibility than advertising prompting communication specialists to call for its use alongside traditional advertising to achieve overall communication goals. To test the differences in readers' response towards advertisements and publicity, a sample of students (N= 104; 52 men and 52 women) were shown printed messages identified as advertising or publicity. The publicity format appeared to be associated with deeper processing because participants had higher recall, more message-relevant thoughts, and better discrimination for the publicity message. In addition, participants rated the publicity message higher on Source Credibility, Brand Attitude, and Purchase Intent than a comparable advertisement.

The success of using biological sex to divide or segment markets requires a thorough understanding of how men and women process and respond to advertisements and other persuasive communications. Toward this end, this research (N = 64; 32 men and 32 women) studied how college-age men and women respond to printed advertisements. There were no differences between the sexes in recall and recognition of claims in advertisements, but men and women generated different types of message relevant thoughts--women generated more category thoughts and men generated more attribute thoughts, suggesting that, while women and men might not differ in the depth of processing, they might use different processing styles.

The characteristics of advertising and publicity are studied in terms of consumers' motivation and information processing ability. Advertising has an advantage over publicity since it allows for more repetitions and thus increases comprehensibility. On the other hand, publicity is more effective in arousing motivation due to credibility and setting advantages and other factors. Knowledge of the impact of different promotional tools can be useful in designing effective promotional strategies.

Based on evidence presented for the Need for Cognition Scale in its original and abbreviated versions, users of the instrument assume its unidimensionality. In three exploratory studies, maximum-likelihood factor analysis reveals the presence of multiple dimensions in both forms of the scale. Four dimensions—enjoyment of cognitive stimulation, preference for complexity, commitment of cognitive effort, and desire for understanding —emerged with some consistency across samples and were found to be fairly resistant to changes in the polarity of scale items and to explain differentially consumer response to advertisements. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research takes a cross-cultural view of the variables influencing dining consumers' perception of the attractiveness of a neighboring country as a venue for dining, and satisfaction with the cross-border dining experience. Specifically, it studies consumers' attractiveness perceptions of neighboring country restaurants as a venue for dining and satisfaction, with the cross-border dining experience as a function of three key individual-difference variables associated with Western and Asian consumers. In a survey of 636 cross-border diners at United States/Canada and Hong Kong/China borders, perceptions of attractiveness and satisfaction were found to vary as a function of variables associated with the cultural attributes of individualism/collectivism, uncertainty avoidance, and time perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]