Edward F. Mcquarrie

Santa Clara University | SCU · Department of Marketing

Visual processing style, defined as the relative propensity to engage in visual processing rather than verbal processing, is an individual difference variable that has been frequently investigated in the consumer psychology literature. Surprisingly, numerous studies have reported no relationship between visual processing style and viewer responses...

This experimental study assessed whether alcohol television storylines impact youth drinking attitudes and intentions and whether corrective epilogues can potentially moderate this impact. Television episodes were professionally produced to depict heavy drinking leading to either positive or negative consequences. The pro- and anti-alcohol episodes...

Online reviews, like those compiled at Yelp, Amazon, Epinions and Tripadvisor, allow consumers to create social network value for other consumers, and to influence the success or failure of reviewed businesses. These reviews, produced without compensation, are a prominent example of how new social media have altered the challenges facing strategic...

Advertising for investment products has changed over the past 50 years. Ads initially targeted investors as defined in standard finance: that is, as fact-seeking utility maximizers. Ad portrayals gradually changed to target consumers, defined as people pursuing diverse life projects. Verbal and factual appeals were supplanted by rhetorical, figurat...

Pinterest represents a new kind of social media that satisfies distinct purposes for female consumers, even as it opens up new opportunities for advertisers. We approach Pinterest as a web-enabled form of scrapbooking and collage, where novel forms of indirect persuasion take place. An analysis of 20 pinboards with 2,291 images showed that women us...

Multiple scandals involving falsified experimental data have shaken the discipline of social psychology, and by extension, the kinds of consumer and marketing research that rely on it. A methodology thought to have unassailable scientific credentials—the statistical analysis of controlled laboratory experiments—emerges as peculiarly vulnerable to f...

Amassing an audience by blogging is a very recent form of online consumer behavior. Consumers not only seek community as earlier studies show, they also look for taste leadership from certain peers Fashion bloggers take hold of the Internet “megaphone” to broadcast and influence taste within an elaborate social and cultural process. It teaches us s...

This study interviewed 15 art directors to explore their understanding of visual brand identity. Art directors define visual brand identity as the holistic look and feel of a brand, manifest as consistency among the brand, its strategy, and all its individual visual elements, ongoing over time. Art directors search for “ownable” visual elements wit...

Most brands are represented visually in print advertisements, and these visual representations must consistently identify the brand to the consumers who encounter it. At the same time, some of the particular visual elements used to represent the brand must change over time, because it is not acceptable to run the same ad year after year without ref...

The megaphone effect refers to the fact that the web makes a mass audience potentially available to ordinary consumers. The article focuses on fashion bloggers who acquire an audience by iterated displays of aesthetic discrimination applied to the selection and combination of clothing. The authors offer a theoretical account of bloggers’ success in...

All forms of personification draw on anthropomorphism, the propensity to attribute human characteristics to objects. In an experiment, we show that visual personification—pictures in an ad that metaphorically represent a product as engaged in some kind of human behavior—can trigger anthropomorphism. Such personification, when embedded in an ad, app...

Indirect persuasion attempts are common in magazine advertisements. Although the use of an indirect claim presumably offers some advantage to an advertiser, as yet, little is known about how consumers process different types of indirect claims. We develop the proposition that when consumers are presented with an indirect metaphorical claim, they be...

A new kind of consumer behavior has emerged online: publishing reviews of a product or service one has consumed, for no tangible compensation (e.g., on Yelp.com). We examine three possibilities for consumers’ motivation to produce reviews: that reviews are written from a sense of community; or instead, to compete for status; or alternatively, out o...

In the decades since publication of Churchill (1979), scale development in marketing has migrated in the direction of shorter scales and much smaller item pools. However, neither a justification for this trend, nor its implications for scale development, has been laid out. This paper focuses on the implications for measurement of consumer dispositi...

Online reviews have become an important part of the retailing environment. However, comparatively little is known about why ordinary consumers voluntarily produce reviews, sometimes in substantial volume over a long period. We examine the role of social facilitation, in the form of community feedback, as well as differences in individual motivation...

Debate over whether marketing scholarship ought to be more relevant has a long history. This paper takes a positive rather than a normative approach to the issue, and provides an empirical examination of the degree of relevance achieved in a sub-discipline of consumer behavior: marketing communications. A content analysis of 485 laboratory experime...

The prevailing view is that imagery in fashion advertising is idealized, and that repeated exposure to the gap between ideal and real is toxic to women's self-esteem, providing prima facie evidence for the negative impact of the marketing system on vulnerable consumers. We challenge this view of fashion ad imagery by means of content analyses and a...

All forms of personification draw on anthropomorphism, the propensity to attribute human characteristics to objects. In an experiment, we show that visual personification—pictures in an ad that metaphorically represent a product as engaged in some kind of human behavior—can trigger anthropomorphism. Such personification, when embedded in an ad, app...

Narrative transportation-to be carried away by a story-has been proposed as a distinct route to persuasion. But as originally conceived, narrative transportation is unlikely to occur in response to advertisements, where persuasive intent is obvious and consumer resistance is expected. We analyze fashion ads to show how narrative transportation can...

The linguistics literature argues that different meanings can be conveyed by different metaphors, and that the meaning content so conveyed will structure the perceptions of message recipients in profoundly different ways. We set out to measure the impact of varying metaphor content within an advertising context on consumer beliefs. We report an exp...

Rhetorical figures appear frequently in the headlines of magazine ads. This paper examines the effect of repetition on ads containing two types of rhetorical figures: easy-to-understand rhymes and challenging puns. The findings indicate that high levels of repetition may not be necessary when ad headlines contain such rhetorical figures, even under...

We examine how the style of magazine advertisements changed between 1969 and 2002, using ads included in the Which Ad Pulled Best? (WAPB) editions published over that period. Six aspects of ad style are examined: the proportion of space allotted to pictures, the amount of body copy used, inclusion of the brand name in the headline, incorporation of...

Discontinuous innovations pose special challenges to attitude measurement. The authors propose a solution which uses Rokeach's (1968) value terms to update Rosenberg's (1956) formulation. This values-based approach solves problems associated with more conventional procedures based on beliefs or adjective checklists. A measure constructed according...

Indirect persuasion attempts are common in magazine advertisements. Although the use of an indirect claim presumably offers some advantage to an advertiser, as yet, little is known about how consumers process different types of indirect claims. We develop the proposition that when consumers are presented with an indirect metaphorical claim, they be...

The goal of rhetorical theory is always to organize the possibilities for persuasion within a domain and to relate each possible stratagem to specific desired outcomes. In this article we develop a visual rhetoric that differentiates the pictorial strategies available to advertisers and links them to consumer response. We propose a new typology tha...

This paper applies the concept of proximal similarity to issues concerning the effective design of laboratory experiments in marketing. Proximal similarity focuses attention on the extent to which experimental procedures capture the distinctive characteristics of the marketing phenomenon under study. It requires a rethinking of the relationship bet...

This re-inquiry examines the robustness of research showing that rhetorical figures such as rhyme and metaphor can have a positive impact on consumer response to advertising. Prior empirical research explicitly directed subjects to process the ads and generally examined either visual or verbal rhetoric, but not both. We embedded ads containing visu...

Rhetorical advertising style consists of the method or manner by which ad content is expressed; an example is the use of rhetorical figures such as metaphor or rhyme. Two studies of rhetorical style in U.S. magazine advertisements from 1954 to 1999 are reported. A qualitative content assessment suggests that rhetorical figures were prevalent throug...

Rhetorical advertising style consists of the method or manner by which ad content is expressed; an example is the use of rhetorical figures such as metaphor or rhyme. Two studies of rhetorical style in U.S. magazine advertisements from 1954 to 1999 are reported. A qualitative content assessment suggests that rhetorical figures were prevalent throug...

Text interpretations, two experiments, and a set of reader-response interviews examine the impact of stylistic elements in advertising that form visual rhetorical figures parallel to those found in language. The visual figures examined here--rhyme, antithesis, metaphor, and pun--produced more elaboration and led to a more favorable attitude toward...

This meta-analysis of 443 laboratory experiments published over five decades examines the extent to which laboratory work has become detached from the goals of advertisers. Detachment occurs when the situation constructed in the laboratory bears little resemblance to the conditions that characterize mass media advertising. Detachment was measured b...

This paper revisits the literature on organizational culture to motivate new theorizing about implementation of the marketing concept. We propose an individual-level construct, conceived as an alternative to the SBU-level conceptions featured in current theorizing about market orientation, and ground it in the organizational cognition perspective o...

In den letzten Jahren haben viele Unternehmen in Nordamerika damit begonnen, die Kundenzufriedenheit in regelmäßigen Abständen zu messen. Diese Messung wird typischerweise mit Hilfe eines Fragebogens durchgeführt, der an eine repräsentative Stichprobe ausgegeben wird. Die Fragen eines solchen Fragebogens liefern Antworten, die in eine numerische Sk...

A sample of 19 residents of Hawaii were surveyed after their social context changed from majority group to minority group status as a result of relocation to the mainland United States to attend college. Multivariate statistical methods were used to evaluate the effects of group attitudes and length of residence in the mainland on ethnic identity a...

A rhetorical figure can be defined as an artful deviation in the form taken by a statement. Since antiquity dozens of figures have been cataloged, ranging from the familiar (rhyme, pun) to the obscure (antimetabole). Despite the frequent appearance of rhetorical figures in print advertisements, their incorporation into advertising theory and resear...

Print ads exhibit resonance when they combine wordplay with a relevant picture to create ambiguity and incongruity. This article uses multiple perspectives and methods within a framework of critical pluralism to investigate advertising resonance. Semiotic text analyses, a content analysis of contemporary magazine ads, two experiments, and phenomeno...

Although a two-component model of product involvement is widely accepted, research has not studied how enduring and situational involvement combine to affect consumer responses. This article investigates three combination models. In particular, an additive model is compared with two interaction models, and the three models are tested empirically us...

Relatively few studies of entrepreneurs have examined the evolution of business ventures over a long period of time. This paper summarizes the fate of 250 technology-based companies founded in Northern California during the 1960s. The three outcomes studied are failure, merger, and continued operation. In addition, interviews with a dozen founders...

A mail survey of registered voters in California examines attitudes toward computer technology. Among both users and non-users, more positive attitudes are associated with greater exposure to computers. The influence of exposure extends to specific opinions and values as well as global affect. The fact of exposure, not benefits received or self-sel...

This paper offers a framework for conceptualizing the events that follow adoption of a microcomputer. Three distinct outcomes of adoption were examined: degree of usage, satisfaction, and attitude toward the technology. Product strength, adopter resources, instrumentality and social integration were used to explain variation in the outcomes experie...

A shortened version of Zaichkowsky's (1985) 20-item Personal Involvement Inventory (Pll) was tested. Termed the Modified Personal Involvement Inventory (MPII), the new 16-item measure is an attempt to purge the PII of items potentially difficult to understand by non-college educated populations. The study investigates the psychometric properties of...

In their reply to Seymour, Edward McQuarrie and Shelby McIntyre address the question of the advantages and disadvantages of focus groups as a research technique. They argue that the biases incurred with focus groups are no greater than those that result from any other market research technique, but caution that polls of focus group members cannot b...

The degree of correspondence that actually obtains between intentions and behavior remains controversial. Two opposing views can be distinguished: the cognitive perspective associated with Fishbein and Ajzen (1975) holds that intentions will be the best predictor of consumer spending, while the behaviorist perspective associated with Foxall (1983)...

Manufacturers of consumer goods frequently have used focus group discussions to learn about consumers' reactions to both new and existing products. Typically, results of these discussions have led to the exploration of new concepts and the identification of new opportunities. Edward McQuarrie and Shelby McIntyre have developed a series of practical...

An abstract is not available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Cincinnati, 1985. Includes abstract. Bibliography: leaves 103-106.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Cincinnati, 1981. Bibliography: leaves 30-31.