Joan Meyers-LevyUniversity of Minnesota Twin Cities | UMN · Department of Marketing
Joan Meyers-Levy
PhD
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57
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Publications (57)
Exploring which, how, why, and when structural aspects of indoor shopping environments may have important and consequential effects on consumers.
Existing inquiry on self-control reveals an inconsistency. The mainstream research on myopic behavior suggests that consumers' use of a high versus low construal level should lead them to exhibit less indulgence. However, more recent work on hyperopia implies the opposite. This research attempts to resolve this discrepancy. In particular, it is pro...
Efforts to identify and understand gender differences have a long history that has sparked lively debate and generated much public interest. Although understanding gender differences is pivotal to consumer researchers and marketers, investigations into this issue by such individuals have been few in number, often weak in theory, and rather limited...
Music can convey two meanings: one referential that consists of descriptive associations, and another embodied that is purely hedonic. We reasoned that consumer characteristics such as one's gender and Need for Cognition (NFC) can affect which meaning(s) of ad background music people use when forming product perceptions. Yet, are such meanings and...
When consumers shop, the flooring underfoot can prompt bodily sensations-a sense of comfort from soft carpeting or fatigue from hard tile flooring. Like moods, such bodily sensations may foster context effects on the products shoppers observe. However, whereas moods prompt only assimilation effects, we demonstrate that consumers' bodily sensations...
Can properties of emotions other than valence influence consumers' responses to emotional ads? We show that consumers' processing motivation moderates whether their attitudes are based on the valence of or the resource demands imposed by the emotion featured in an ad. When motivation is low, consumers respond more favorably to positively versus neg...
Can the surface material of a display table prompt context effects on shoppers ’ product evaluations? If so, how might the direction of such effects be influenced by people’s use of different modes of cognition— namely, holistic versus analytic cognition? The authors theorize and find that people’s use of holistic cognition, as prompted by an inter...
We investigate the apparent rarity of contrast effects in diverse-category contextual and target product settings. Three studies show that the direction of context effects depends on (a) whether target product positioning is abstract or concrete, (b) consumers' adoption of an item-specific, similarity-focused relational or dissimilarity-focused rel...
This article demonstrates that variations in ceiling height can prime concepts that, in turn, affect how consumers process information. We theorized that when reasonably salient, a high versus low ceiling can prime the concepts of freedom versus confinement, respectively. These concepts, in turn, can prompt consumers' use of predominately relationa...
Much research has explained regulatory focus effects via the alternative psychological states (eagerness vs. vigilance) people experience when they adopt different regulatory foci. This article identifies for the first time the cognitive mechanism that underlies regulatory focus effects. We propose that promotion-focus individuals engage in relatio...
This commentary aims to build on Shavitt, Lalwani, Zhang, and Torelli's (2006) target article and extant work that demonstrates the value added by considering people's vertical or horizontal orientation. I suggest several ways by which one might attempt to advance literature concerning the horizontal/vertical distinction as well as our understandin...
Music theory distinguishes between two types of meanings that music can impart: (1) embodied meaning, which is purely hedonic, context independent, and based on the degree of stimulation the musical sound affords, and (2) referential meaning, which is context dependent and reflects networks of semantic-laden, external world concepts. Two studies in...
Many researchers claim that pictures can impart descriptive concepts through their choice of stylistic properties, such as the orientation of depicted objects or the camera angle used. Yet little empirical research has explored if this is so, how readily or when such concepts are discerned, and/or whether these concepts can affect viewers' percepti...
Mixed findings have emerged in message framing studies, even when such studies employ the same general type of framing, such as goal framing. This article attempts to show that by ex- tending the heuristic-systematic model-based explanation of message framing effects to incor- porate conditions that may prompt both systematic and heuristic processi...
Over thirty years ago Krugman (1965) claimed that learning of advertising messages was much more like an Ebbinghaus nonsense syllable memory task than an exercise in rhetoric. If anything, he seems even more right today in a media environment that continues to become more cluttered. In this article, we investigate the role that memory plays in the...
In this article, the authors propose an integrative model of advertising persuasion that orders the major theories and empirically supported generalizations about persuasion that have been offered in the information-processing literature. The authors begin by reviewing this literature, placing particular emphasis on the assorted processes or mechan...
Advertising repetition is frequently used to influence consumers' judgments of an advertised product. Several studies have found that when the target ad is repeated in a cluttered environment, repetition may not affect judgments. These findings have provoked little interest because they seem to be attributable to the interference introduced by the...
In this article, the authors propose an integrative model of advertising persuasion that orders the major theories and empirically supported generalizations about persuasion that have been offered in the information-processing literature. The authors begin by reviewing this literature, placing particular emphasis on the assorted processes or mechan...
This article examines how two ad execution characteristics intended to heighten persuasion can influence the resources required to process an ad under high and low motivation conditions. These ad execution characteristics include (1) whether the ad copy is narrative or factual and (2) whether the ad layout either physically integrates or separates...
When consumers learn about a new product, cues in the surrounding context have been found to bias their response to the product in two ways. In some instances, judgments of the product are assimilated toward the affect or descrip- tive implications associated with the context, whereas in other circumstances, responses are contrasted with or adjuste...
This article examines two related issues: how variation in the level of self-reference in which people engage affects their persuasion and what factors may moderate self-reference effects. Respondents viewed ads that varied on two dimensions intended to influence the use of self-reference, namely, the wording of the ad copy and the perspective from...
The impact of presenting full-color, black-and-white, and color-highlighted ad photos is examined under different processing resource conditions. When viewers devote few resources to processing, ads with some color outperform black-and-white ads. However, when viewers engage in more effortful ad processing, attitudes are sensitive to the match betw...
Research in both the consumer and aesthetics literatures suggests that the ambiguity created by a cropped or incomplete object may prompt people to seek closure by supplying the missing part. In turn, this process of resolving the ambiguity can enhance affect. Applying this notion to advertisements, a study is reported that examines whether and whe...
In 2 studies, with a total of 56 women and 11 men, the authors examined whether or not G. Mandler's (1982) schema congruity theory would explain students' evaluations of new products purportedly introduced by companies with established brand names that were congruent, moderately incongruent, or extremely incongruent in relationship to the product....
Associations to a contextual cue were contrasted with those of an advertised object when the cognitive resources devoted to message processing were substantial and when the categories to which the contextual cue and the advertised object belonged displayed low overlap. The absence of either of these factors prompted assimilation. A two-factor theor...
Associations to a contextual cue were contrasted with those of an advertised object when the cognitive resources devoted to message processing were substantial and when the categories to which the contextual cue and the advertised object belonged displayed low overlap. The absence of either of these factors prompted assimilation. A two-factor theor...
Existing theorizing suggests that consumers should experience more intense affective reactions when a positive outcome is missed (short temporal distance) than when its occurrence is relatively remote (long temporal distance). Two studies are reported that explore why and when these effects occur and whether they also occur for persuasion responses...
Two studies explored how and why the camera angle used to photograph products in ads may affect viewers' product evaluations. The findings suggest that such camera angle effects are likely to emerge when viewers' motivation to process ad information is either low or moderate rather than high. When processing motivation was low, evaluations were mos...
Two studies explored how and why the camera angle used to photograph products in ads may affect viewers’ product evaluations. The findings suggest that such camera angle effects are likely to emerge when viewers’ motivation to process ad information is either low or moderate rather than high. When processing motivation was low, evaluations were mos...
This article examines the distinction between and the effects of two different types of elaboration on various indicators of ad effectiveness. One type of elaboration known as item-specific processing, emphasizes the distinctive features of each ad claim. A second type, called relational processing, highlights similarities (e.g., common themes) tha...
Existing research suggests that, relative to males, females often are more concerned with the particulars of message claims when processing advertising messages. This research examines how males process messages, when gender differences in processing are likely to occur, and whether variance In either information availability (the extent of message...
Data from two experiments suggest that the genders differ in how they make judgments. In comparison with men, women appeared to have a lower threshold for elaborating on message cues and thus made greater use of such cues in judging products. These differences were eliminated both when the message cues prompted so little attention that they were be...
Data from two experiments suggest that the genders differ in how they make judgments. In comparison with men, women appeared to have a lower threshold for elaborating on message cues and thus made greater use of such cues in judging products. These differences were eliminated both when the message cues prompted so little attention that they were be...
Studies examining message framing effects on persuasion have produced mixed results. Some studies show positively framed messages, which specify attributes or benefits gained by using a product, to be more persuasive than negatively framed messages, which specify attributes or benefits lost by not using a product. Reverse outcomes have been obtaine...
Studies examining message framing effects on persuasion have produced mixed results. Some studies show positively framed messages, which specify attributes or benefits gained by using a product, to be more persuasive than negatively framed messages, which specify attributes or benefits lost by not using a product. Reverse outcomes have been obtaine...
Research suggests that priming different hemisphere processing styles with particular types of tasks or stimuli can affect product judgment. Visual spatial or pictorial information seems to activate the undifferentiated, holistic processing style associated with the right hemisphere, while linguistic or verbal information seems to activate the deta...
Mandler theorized that the level of congruity between a product and a more general product category schema may influence the nature of information processing and thus product evaluations. Products that are moderately incongruent with their associated category schemas are expected to stimulate processing that leads to a more favorable evaluation rel...
Theory that memory for brand information is enhanced by associations related to the brand name (because each association represents a possible retrieval cue) is countered by other theory that associations may cue competing concepts and so produce interference. The current research examines this issue in terms of the distinctiveness hypothesis. Resu...
Two experiments provide convergent evidence that sex roles, when activated, influence males' and females' judgments. Activation of the genders' sex roles was achieved either by means of explicit sex role primes or by making unambiguous self- and other-relevant information highly salient. In accordance with males' self-focused agentic sex role, male...