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Evidence-based Advertising
Abstract
Extensive and repeated testing of a wide variety of alternative reasonable hypotheses is necessary in order to increase knowledge about complex phenomena such as advertising. While non-experimental evidence is useful for less complex issues, laboratory and field experiments, as well as quasi-experimental studies, are needed to obtain useful knowledge about complex ones. Fortunately, much useful empirical research has been conducted on how to create an effective advertisement. A literature review, conducted over 16 years, summarized knowledge from 687 sources that included more than 3,000 studies. The review led to 195 condition-action statements (laws or principles) for advertising. Advertisers often fail to follow these principles, perhaps because they have not previously been available in a codified form. (We were unable to find the principles in a convenience sample of nine advertising textbooks; of the more than 6,500 references in these textbooks, only 24 overlapped with the 687 used to develop the principles.) By using these principles, practitioners can substantially increase advertising effectiveness. There are also opportunities for researchers. Relevant evidence-based papers were published at the rate of 20 per year from 2000 through 2009. The rate of knowledge accumulation could be increased via directed research (e.g., invited papers and business-sponsored research), and by publishing evidence-based research findings on the Internet.
... Pre-testing most often compares to benchmarked performance, with a limited diagnosis for why an advertisement may or may not work in creative terms. In contrast, the index method can theoretically increase the persuasiveness of advertisements by helping advertisers to ideate using a wider variety of creative strategies and tactics, and to consistently consider the many complex inputs that advertising can draw upon (Armstrong, 2010;Armstrong, 2011). ...
Purpose
This study aims to independently test the predictive validity of the Persuasion Principles Index (PPI) for video advertisements for low-involvement products with a measure of in-market sales effectiveness. This study follows the inaugural test conducted by Armstrong et al. (2016) for print advertisements for high-involvement utilitarian products with a measure of advertising recall.
Design/methodology/approach
The method was in line with that developed by Armstrong et al. (2016) for rating advertisements and assessing the reliability of ratings. Consensus PPI scores were calculated for a data set of 242 matched pairs of television advertisements. For each pair, the authors determined whether the advertisement that better adhered to the persuasion principles performed better in-market.
Findings
Consensus PPI scores predicted the more sales effective television advertisement for 55% (confidence interval (CI) = 49%, 61%) of the 242 pairs. This result is no better than chance and much weaker than the result from the initial validation study, which found that the consensus PPI scores predicted the more recalled print advertisement for 74.5% (CI = 66%, 83%) of 96 pairs.
Research limitations/implications
This study replicated the application of the PPI as per Armstrong’s guidelines and extended validity testing to a different set of advertising conditions. Findings indicate that better adherence to the persuasion principles produces only a weak, positive effect for predicting the performance of television advertisements for low-involvement products. A research agenda that flows from the results is discussed.
Practical implications
The authors suggest that the PPI in its present form is best used to predict advertising performance under conditions as per the inaugural validation test (Armstrong et al. , 2016).
Originality/value
Advertisers will require compelling evidence of the PPI’s predictive accuracy to adopt the tool for pre-testing advertising. This study is the first independent test of the predictive validity of the PPI and its generalisability across advertising conditions. Another contribution of this study is the assessment of Armstrong’s advice to remove unreliable ratings. The authors show that this procedure, surprisingly, does not improve the predictive accuracy of the PPI.
... Advertising serves a specific goal, namely consumer persuasion. In this context, consumer becomes tired of excessive repetition of the same advertisement prompting tedium effects [28]. ...
Food consumption and eating behaviors are variably affected by a whole range of factors and strongly influenced by environmental and social contexts. According to different studies, the highly use of food images in media and publicity, and brand placements in movies and fashion could explain reinforcing new eating behaviors and lifestyle patterns. The aim of this review is 1) to highlight the adoption of the visual discourse of food in media, advertisements, movies and fashion to promote new consumption norms; and 2) to suggest a collaborative effort to build smart food policies with inputs from food, fashion and film industries. Food endorsed by celebrities and brand logo in advertising are undoubtedly the most visible forms of food marketing communications. Besides, social media and mobile technologies provide novel opportunities to support food marketing and advertising techniques. Food brand placement is another marketing strategy highly used during the last decades by the advertising and food industries to reach consumers. Food brand placement is present in all types of movies, which present in their imagery a world and food that are always patently made by economic and cultural power. Food and fashion industries are strongly connected and use similar worldviews with same economic logic and marketing strategies including; merchandising, brand placement and social media. Public health efforts to promote healthy food patterns and lifestyles must compete with pervasive food marketing for unhealthy products. Public-private partnership is crucial to regulate food marketing strategies and enhance public health efforts. Social networks sites could be also used as potential means to increase the reach and efficiency of public health nutrition activities, such as visual communication for healthy food marketing and nutrition education. This review considers the great challenges related to food and health and suggests a framework illustrating the effect of the visual food discourse on health. This framework is the most comprehensive path for meeting the grand challenges in visual food marketing by setting focus and priority areas for food policies. Research and practical implications are also suggested with the goal of better understanding the visual discourse of food and improving public health. Finally, this review supports the concerns of nutrition experts and policy regulators about the bourgeoning practice of placing nutritionally poor food and beverages in popular entertainment formats such as media, fashion and movies. Food is not only the source of nutrients for human, but also plays various roles in our daily lives, beliefs, attitudes and socioeconom-ics [1,2]. Food is an important component of a society [2] and has many symbolic meanings; it expresses and establishes relationship between individuals and their environments, as well as between
... Advertising serves a specific goal, namely consumer persuasion. In this context, consumer becomes tired of excessive repetition of the same advertisement prompting tedium effects [28]. ...
Food consumption and eating behaviors are variably affected by a whole range of factors and strongly influenced by environmental and social contexts. According to different studies, the highly use of food images in media and publicity, and brand placements in movies and fashion could explain reinforcing new eating behaviors and lifestyle patterns. The aim of this review is 1) to highlight the adoption of the visual discourse of food in media, advertisements, movies and fashion to promote new consumption norms; and 2) to suggest a collaborative effort to build smart food policies with inputs from food, fashion and film industries. Food endorsed by celebrities and brand logo in advertising are undoubtedly the most visible forms of food marketing communications. Besides, social media and mobile technologies provide novel opportunities to support food marketing and advertising techniques. Food brand placement is another marketing strategy highly used during the last decades by the advertising and food industries to reach consumers. Food brand placement is present in all types of movies, which present in their imagery a world and food that are always patently made by economic and cultural power. Food and fashion industries are strongly connected and use similar worldviews with same economic logic and marketing strategies including; merchandising, brand placement and social media. Public health efforts to promote healthy food patterns and lifestyles must compete with pervasive food marketing for unhealthy products. Public-private partnership is crucial to regulate food marketing strategies and enhance public health efforts. Social networks sites could be also used as potential means to increase the reach and efficiency of public health nutrition activities, such as visual communication for healthy food marketing and nutrition education. This review considers the great challenges related to food and health and suggests a framework illustrating the effect of the visual food discourse on health. This framework is the most comprehensive path for meeting the grand challenges in visual food marketing by setting focus and priority areas for food policies. Research and practical implications are also suggested with the goal of better understanding the visual discourse of food and improving public health. Finally, this review supports the concerns of nutrition experts and policy regulators about the bourgeoning practice of placing nutritionally poor food and beverages in popular entertainment formats such as media, fashion and movies. Food is not only the source of nutrients for human, but also plays various roles in our daily lives, beliefs, attitudes and socioeconomics [1,2]. Food is an important component of a society [2] and has many symbolic meanings; it expresses and establishes relationship between individuals and their environments, as well as between
... Rule-based instruction assists in consistently creating high-impact ads and avoiding bad results (Armstrong, 2010(Armstrong, , 2011. In an effort to define a set of guidelines for effective pharma branding, the study here turned to Jungian archetypes, a subconsciously understood set of roles and patterns of behavior shared universally by people around the world (Jung, 1919;Mark & Pearson, 2001). ...
The pharmaceutical industry spends billions annually on marketing to physicians (over $4.3 billion in 2014). The industry as a whole has a lot of experience in determining what to say to physicians, but it is less confident when it comes to how to say it—sometimes leading to advertising that does not engage, thereby costing sales. In an effort to define a set of rule‐based guidelines for effective pharma branding, the study adapts the primary Jungian archetypes to develop the first collection of archetypal tones of voice for healthcare products. The study here demonstrates, via a series of fuzzy‐set qualitative comparative analyses that well executed ads following an archetype consistently connect with physician audiences, while nonarchetypal healthcare ads demonstrate an inconsistent performance. Such an analysis would traditionally take the form of null hypothesis significance testing (NHST), but NHST provides substantially less insights than algorithm modeling and the use of fuzzy‐set qualitative comparative analysis as this study describes.
... J. Scott Armstrong's (2011) call for more evidence-based research underscores the need for more research on topics that have been studied for a long time. As Armstrong observes (p. ...
... Similarly, there should be strong reason to believe that a mandatory disclosure will meet its intended objectives. It should also be noted that in judging individual studies, policy makers would be well advised to consider additional criteria applied by the courts, such as the "red flag" criteria used to evaluate surveys and other evidence (summarized by Ford 2005; see also Andrews and Maronick 1995;Diamond 2000;Preston 1992 Armstrong (2011) describes, should be viewed as especially important. Thus, for complex issues such as labeling (or other promotional impacts; see Choi, Paek, and King 2012), findings should be based on intensive and repeated testing, especially in experimental contexts, including those conducted in both laboratory and field settings. ...
In this article, the authors introduce the notion of a "sound disclosure" and define it from the perspective of academic, business, and legal/policy (expert) constituencies. The authors define sound disclosure as the direct linkage of a policy standard to a dedicated, rigorous consumer testing methodology that measures explicitly stated communication objectives put forth in the policy. Sound disclosure results when the policy is influenced by the disclosure testing. Consequences of a sound disclosure testing regime can include withdrawing the disclosure from the marketplace because of harmful, unintended consequences to the target population or, conversely, adding supplementary materials (e. g., educational primes) to maximize the disclosure's effectiveness. Drawing from previous research, the authors illustrate various standards of sound disclosure efficacy.
... While a failure to use evidence-based practices is deplored if not severely condemned in medicine, the fields of marketing and management are still by and large free of evidence-based work. A recent study by Armstrong (2011) revealed that no item out of a convenience sample of nine advertising textbooks and three practitioner books contained a single reference to empirically backed advertising principles (cf. Carlson et al. 2011), while another recent study showed that only 25 per cent of US business schools make use of evidence-based management principles 'in some form' (Charlier et al. 2011). ...
This paper applies emerging research on epistemic virtues to business ethics. Inspired by recent work on epistemic virtues in philosophy, I develop a view in which epistemic virtues contribute to the acquisition of knowledge that is instrumentally valuable in the realisation of particular ends, business ends in particular. I propose a conception of inquiry according to which epistemic actions involve investigation, belief adoption and justification, and relate this to the traditional ‘justified true belief’ analysis of knowledge. I defend the view that epistemic virtues enable and/or motivate people to perform epistemic actions. An examination of the key epistemic virtues of love of knowledge, epistemic courage, temperance, justice, generosity and humility provides some initial evidence suggesting that the way epistemic virtues enable or motivate is by countering a number of biases that have been uncovered by behavioural economics, and also indicates ways in which the instrumental epistemic value view is superior to other approaches to epistemic virtue offered in the literature.
1. Представленность дискурсивной компетенции на начальном этапе преподавания РКИ в учебных пособиях
2. Discoursive words in Russian and English texts
The aim of this chapter is to explore the role of digitisation and artificial intelligence (AI) on social media and in aiding brand awareness marketing—an approach to create, communicate, and deliver value offerings to customers. It proposes that consumers are ready for a new journey in which AI is a tool for endless options and information that are narrowed and curated in a personalised way. It also provides insight for managers regarding the AI-driven environment on branding and customer management practices in today's globalised world.
"Quasi-experimental data" provide a valid and relatively low-cost approach toward developing empirical generalizations (EGs). These data are obtained from studies in which some key variables have been controlled in the design. We describe our EGs as normative statements, i.e., "evidence-based principles." Using data from 240 pairs of print advertisements from five editions of the Which Ad Pulled Best series, we analyzed 56 of the advertising principles from Persuasive Advertising by J. Scott Armstrong (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming). These data controlled for target market, product, size of the advertisement, media, and in half the cases, for the brand. Aspects of the advertisements differed, however, as in illustrations, headlines, and text. The findings from quasi-experimental analyses were consistent with field experiments for all seven principles where such comparisons were possible. Furthermore, for 26 principles they unanimously corroborated the available laboratory experiments as well as the meta-analyses for seven principles. In short, quasi-experimental findings always agreed with experimental findings. This is impressive given that the quasi-experimental analyses-and some of the experimental analyses-involved small samples, and often used different criteria.
Research on practitioner theories of advertising uncovered that agency practitioners not only have definite theoretical beliefs about how advertising works, they also have meta-theoretical beliefs, fundamental presuppositions about the nature and possibility of knowledge in advertising. The meta-theoretical belief in creativity and its dictum of “no rules” was found to be more important than any other guiding principle in advertising work. The primacy of creativity denies the possibility of any other moderator-focused theories that would prescribe “rules” for creative content. Practitioners believe that the ontological status of advertising (as a territory defined by creativity, art, and tacit skill) places it mostly outside the reach of scientific modeling. While practitioners acknowledge that knowledge about advertising is “layered” (i.e., certain aspects of it are more explainable by the legitimation system of science), they also insist that the creative “layer” is much thicker than other layers. A further qualifying factor is practitioners’ epistemological skepticism, which questions the validity of both academic and commercial social research as applied to advertising and suggests instead that knowledge about advertising is better understood as “common sense.” The study’s findings have fundamental consequences for the professional aspirations of the advertising industry as well as the academician-practitioner gap in advertising.
This paper provides a theoretical explanation for why firms behave as though they use round prices to signal quality. By replacing the linear demand curve in Bagwell and Riordan's (1991) price as a signal of quality model with a kinked demand curve, and analyzing what price endings firms are most likely to use, the following observations can be made: (1) Firms that are using high prices to signal quality are more likely to set those prices at round numbers, and (2) price-endings themselves are not necessarily signals of quality. A simulation was conducted to demonstrate that these findings generally hold true even in the presence of demand spikes at 9-ending prices (e.g., Schindler and Kibarian 1996). Finally, empirical evidence is provided to demonstrate that firms tend to use more round prices for higherquality products, and that this relationship is even stronger for product categories where consumers are less able to detect the true level of quality prior to purchase.
Recall, one of the key metrics in advertising testing, has been criticized over the years as favoring rational advertising over emotional advertising. An analysis and reconsideration of the available evidence show that emotional advertising is not penalized by recall, and that emotional content in well-executed commercials can actually boost recall. Strong empirical evidence shows that recall, when used in combination with other measures, is a valid measure of advertising effectiveness and, as the analysis here illustrates, does not miss the emotion in advertising that builds brands.
Management folklore sometimes leads to unprofitable decision making. Thus, studies of the value of such folklore should be of interest to managers, especially when they identify unprofitable procedures. I reviewed empirical research on scientific publishing and concluded that studies supporting management folklore are likely to be favorably reviewed for publication and to be cited. However, researchers who obtain findings that refute folklore are likely to encounter resistance in publication and are less likely to be cited. My experience with papers on portfolio planning methods and escalation bias illustrates the problem. To encourage the publication of papers that challenge management folklore, editors should use results-blind reviews and, in some cases, constrain, reduce, or eliminate peer review.
Notes that an accumulating body of research on clinical judgment, decision making, and probability estimation has documented a substantial lack of ability of both experts and nonexperts. However, evidence shows that people have great confidence in their fallible judgment. This article examines how this contradiction can be resolved and, in so doing, discusses the relationship between learning and experience. The basic tasks that are considered involve judgments made for the purpose of choosing between actions. At some later time, outcome feedback is used for evaluating the accuracy of judgment. The manner in which judgments of the contingency between predictions and outcomes are made is discussed and is related to the difficulty people have in searching for disconfirming information to test hypotheses. A model for learning and maintaining confidence in one's own judgment is developed that includes the effects of experience and both the frequency and importance of positive and negative feedback. (78 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
It is often claimed that managers do not read serious research papers in journals. If true, this neglect would seem to pose a problem because journals are the dominant source of knowledge in management science. By examining results from the forecasting principles project, which was designed to summarize all useful knowledge in forecasting, we found that journals have provided 89 percent of the useful knowledge. However, journal papers relevant to practice are difficult to find because fewer than three percent of papers on forecasting contain useful findings. That turns out to be about one useful paper per month over the last half century. Once found, papers are difficult to interpret. Managers need low-cost, easily accessible sources that summarize advice (principles) from research; journals do not meet this need. To increase the rate of progress in developing and communicating principles, researchers, journal editors, textbook writers, software developers, Web-site designers, and practitioners should make some changes. We offer some examples: Researchers should directly study forecasting principles. Journal editors should actively solicit papers; invited submissions were about 20 times better than standard submissions at producing useful findings that were often cited, and they do so at lower cost. Textbook writers should focus on principles so that readers can apply knowledge. Web-site and software developers should provide practitioners with low-cost ways to use principles. Practitioners should apply the principles that are currently available.
Although the use of 9 price endings is widespread amongst US retailers there is little evidence of their effectiveness. In this paper, we present a series of three field-studies in which price endings were experimentally manipulated. The data yield two conclusions. First, use of a9 price endings is widespread amongst US retailers there is little evidence of their effectiveness. In this paper, we present a series of three field-studies in which price endings were experimentally manipulated. The data yield two conclusions. First, use of a 9 price ending increased demand in all three experiments. Second, the increase in demand was stronger for new items than for items that the retailer had sold in previous years. There is also some evidence that 9 price endings are less effective when retailers use < img src="/content/G27943713N352N8W/xxlarge8220.gif" alt="ldquo" align="MIDDLE" border="0Sale < img src="/content/G27943713N352N8W/xxlarge8221.gif" alt="rdquo" align="MIDDLE" border="0 cues. Together, these results suggest that9 price endings are less effective when retailers use Sale cues. Together, these results suggest that 9-endings may be more effective when customers have limited information, which may in turn help to explain why retailers do not use $9 price endings on every item.
The effect of a message source on the persuasion of a target audience has been a topic of interest to scholars in psychology,
consumer behavior, and communications for many years. Narrative reviews of this literature are available; the contribution
of this study is that we present a quantitative review of studies of source effects on persuasion. One of our research goals
is to determine how strong and consistent source manipulations tend to be. We find that, on average, source manipulations
account for nine percent of explained variance among studies reporting significant findings. In particular, expertise tends
to have the greatest effect on persuasion with an average of 16 percent of the explained variance being due to the expert
versus non-expert manipulation. As well as gaining insight into the pattern of results across a body of literature, our findings
may be used as benchmarks by researchers, as advocated by Sawyer and Ball (1981), to evaluate results of future persuasion
studies employing a source manipulation.
I briefly summarize prior research showing that tests of statistical significance are improperly used even in leading scholarly journals. Attempts to educate researchers to avoid pitfalls have had little success. Even when done properly, however, statistical significance tests are of no value. Other researchers have discussed reasons for these failures. I was unable to find empirical evidence to support the use of significance tests under any conditions. I then show that tests of statistical significance are harmful to the development of scientific knowledge because they distract the researcher from the use of proper methods. I illustrate the dangers of significance tests by examining a re-analysis of the M3-Competition. Although the authors of the re-analysis conducted a proper series of statistical tests, they suggested that the original M3-Competition was not justified in concluding that combined forecasts reduce errors, and that the selection of the best method is dependent on the selection of a proper error measure. I show that the original conclusions were correct. Authors should avoid tests of statistical significance; instead, they should report on effect sizes, confidence intervals, replications/extensions, and meta-analyses. Practitioners should ignore significance tests and journals should discourage them.
The choice overload hypothesis states that an increase in the number of options to choose from may lead to adverse consequences such as a decrease in the motivation to choose or the satisfaction with the finally chosen option. A number of studies found strong instances of choice overload in the lab and in the field, but others found no such effects or found that more choices may instead facilitate choice and increase satisfaction. In a meta-analysis of 63 conditions from 50 published and unpublished experiments (N = 5,036), we found a mean effect size of virtually zero but considerable variance between studies. While further analyses indicated several potentially important preconditions for choice overload, no sufficient conditions could be identified. However, some idiosyncratic moderators proposed in single studies may still explain when and why choice overload reliably occurs; we review these studies and identify possible directions for future research. (c) 2010 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..
The prevalence of faulty citations impedes the growth of scientific knowledge. Faulty citations include omissions of relevant papers, incorrect references, and quotation errors that misreport findings. We discuss key studies in these areas. We then examine citations to “Estimating nonresponse bias in mail surveys,” one of the most frequently cited papers from the Journal of Marketing Research, to illustrate these issues. This paper is especially useful in testing for quotation errors because it provides specific operational recommendations on adjusting for nonresponse bias; therefore, it allows us to determine whether the citing papers properly used the findings. By any number of measures, those doing survey research fail to cite this paper and, presumably, make inadequate adjustments for nonresponse bias. Furthermore, even when the paper was cited, 49 of the 50 studies that we examined reported its findings improperly. The inappropriate use of statistical-significance testing led researchers to conclude that nonresponse bias was not present in 76 percent of the studies in our sample. Only one of the studies in the sample made any adjustment for it. Judging from the original paper, we estimate that the study researchers should have predicted nonresponse bias and adjusted for 148 variables. In this case, the faulty citations seem to have arisen either because the authors did not read the original paper or because they did not fully understand its implications. To address the problem of omissions, we recommend that journals include a section on their websites to list all relevant papers that have been overlooked and show how the omitted paper relates to the published paper. In general, authors should routinely verify the accuracy of their sources by reading the cited papers. For substantive findings, they should attempt to contact the authors for confirmation or clarification of the results and methods. This would also provide them with the opportunity to enquire about other relevant references. Journal editors should require that authors sign statements that they have read the cited papers and, when appropriate, have attempted to verify the citations.
We examined three approaches to research in marketing: exploratory hypotheses, dominant hypothesis, and competing hypotheses. Our review of empirical studies on scientific methodology suggests that the use of a single dominant hypothesis lacks objectivity relative to the use of exploratory and competing hypotheses approaches. We then conducted a publication audit of over 1,700 empirical papers in six leading marketing journals during 1984-1999. Of these, 74% used the dominant hypothesis approach, while 13 % used multiple competing hypotheses, and 13% were exploratory. Competing hypotheses were more commonly used for studying methods (25%) than models (17%) and phenomena (7%). Changes in the approach to hypotheses since 1984 have been modest; there was a slight decrease in the percentage of competing hypotheses to 11%, which is plained primarily by an increasing proportion of papers on phenomena. Of the studies based on hypothesis testing, only 11 % described the conditions under which the hypotheses would apply, and dominant hypotheses were below competing hypotheses in this regard. Marketing scientists differed substantially in their opinions about what types of studies should be published and what was published. On average, they did not think dominant hypotheses should be used as often as they were, and they underestimated their use.
Research bearing on the role of guilt in social influence is reviewed in this chapter. Guilt is an emotion naturally suited to exploitation in the service of social influence, by virtue of its action-motivating aspects and its ability to be aroused by relationally significant others. Guilt can be a very powerful influence mechanism, as indicated by studies of guilt arousal in everyday life (where self-reports of behavioral change suggest that guilt commonly effects change), by studies of the relationship between transgressions and compliance (in which, a meta-analytic review reveals, relatively large effects of transgression on compliance are obtained under a variety of conditions), and by studies of hypocrisy-induction effects (which commonly are ascribed to dissonance but might equally well reflect guilt). However, guilt-based influence can fail quite dramatically; a meta-analysis of research on guilt-based appeals in persuasive messages reveals that, although more-explicit guilt appeals successfully arouse greater guilt than do less-explicit appeals, they are significantly less persuasive. Finally, recent research suggests that anticipated guilt feelings can play an important role in shaping conduct and hence may provide mechanisms of social influence.
Understanding Effective Advertising: How, When, and Why Advertising Works reviews and summarizes an extensive body of research on advertising effectiveness. In particular, it summarizes what we know today on when, how, and why advertising works. The primary focus of the book is on the instantaneous and carryover effects of advertising on consumer choice, sales, and market share. In addition, the book reviews research on the rich variety of ad appeals, and suggests which appeals work, and when, how, and why they work. The first comprehensive book on advertising effectiveness, Understanding Effective Advertising reviews over 50 years of research in the fields of advertising, marketing, consumer behavior, and psychology. It covers all aspects of advertising and its effect on sales, including sales elasticity, carryover effects, content effects, and effects of frequency. Author Gerard J. Tellis distills three decades of academic and professional experience into one volume that successfully dismisses many popular myths about advertising.
Through the cooperation of a direct-mail women's clothing retailer, we were able to conduct a well-controlled experiment testing the sales effect of using retail prices that end in the digits 99 rather than 00 (e.g., 30.00). The results indicated that the use of 99 endings led to increased consumer purchasing. This finding demonstrates the importance of the manager's decision concerning a price 's rightmost digits. © 1996 New York University. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.
In a bibliometric study of the advertising literature, the authors identified the most-cited writers, most-cited published works, and co-citation networks for 1982–1985 and 1992–1995. Such connections among scholars can be used to identify streams of research in advertising; some of these streams show temporal progressions. The 10,526 citations indicate that a handful of works from the 1960s and 1970s continue to have an impact on the advertising literature, whereas a large and interconnected body of work from the 1980s has had more recent impact. These findings may indicate greater paradigmatic rigor in recent years.
Customers' evaluations of quality and satisfaction are critical inputs in the development of marketing strategies. Given the increasingly common practice of asking for such evaluations, buyers of products (e.g., cars) and services (e.g., hotels, educational programs/courses) often know in advance that they subsequently will be asked to provide their evaluations. In a series of field and laboratory studies, the authors demonstrate that expecting to evaluate leads to less favorable quality and satisfaction evaluations and reduces customers' willingness to purchase and recommend the evaluated services. The negative bias of expected evaluations is observed when actual quality is either low or high, and it persists even when buyers are told explicitly to consider both the positive and negative aspects. The authors examine three possible explanations for this systematic bias, which are referred to as negativity enhancement, role expectation, and vigilant processing. The findings are most consistent with the negativity enhancement account, indicating that unless buyers begin the evaluation task with low expectations, they tend to focus during consumption primarily on negative aspects of product/service quality. The article concludes with a discussion of the theoretical and practical implications of this research.
This research demonstrates the positive effects of moment-to-moment entertainment and the negative effects of moment-to-moment information value on consumers' likelihood to continue watching during a television commercial. A notable finding is that both the entertainment and the information value have a strong multiplicative effect on the probability to stop viewing.
The present book, by one of the most energetic of these applied psychologists, is in many ways a monument to the advancing spirit of science in business. Its author has been for many years actively engaged in teaching, research, and consultation in the special field of which the book treats. Many of his own investigations, heretofore known only to the readers of technical journals, are here assembled. With these are to be found, in systematic arrangement, and with their interpretation lucidly presented, many significant results from the studies of other workers. Such experimental findings, vividly illustrated, and related, as they here are, to the general principles of human nature and to the concrete problems of advertising, constitute a lively picture of the progress of the psychology of advertising and its contemporary status. Earlier writers who attempted to present the psychological principles involved in advertising and selling were impelled to delete such words as "science," "mental," and "psychology" from their vocabularies. The old-fashioned business man shied from these words as he did from suggested investments in flying machines, wireless communication, moving pictures, and horseless carriages. Today's stock exchange list shows that there are more things in science than our progenitors even dreamed of. And today the scientific psychologist need not blush at the name of his specialty. Instead, his outstanding solicitude is the task of educating the business man to discriminate between the pirates who fly the word "psychology" at their masthead and the genuine expert who undertakes to dig out sober fact from the mines of data and communicate it in the form of law and verifiable conclusion. The present volume, presenting, with accuracy and inviting form, the authentic knowledge and the current methods of the psychology of advertising, fills several long-felt needs. It assembles for the student, the teacher, and the practicing advertiser many scattered contributions. It sets these in a frame of general mental laws and tendencies, thus bringing up to date and aptly illustrating the established principles of one important field of the astonishingly complex art of publicity. Finally, its detailed exposition of the technique of investigation and analysis should give new impetus and suggest new problems to those whose privilege it will be to push still further the adaptation of our knowledge of our nature to the satisfaction of our needs. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The reliability of peer review of scientific documents and the evaluative criteria scientists use to judge the work of their peers are critically reexamined with special attention to the consistently low levels of reliability that have been reported. Referees of grant proposals agree much more about what is unworthy of support than about what does have scientific value. In the case of manuscript submissions this seems to depend on whether a discipline (or subfield) is general and diffuse (e.g., cross-disciplinary physics, general fields of medicine, cultural anthropology, social psychology) or specific and focused (e.g., nuclear physics, medical specialty areas, physical anthropology, and behavioral neuroscience). In the former there is also much more agreement on rejection than acceptance, but in the latter both the wide differential in manuscript rejection rates and the high correlation between referee recommendations and editorial decisions suggests that reviewers and editors agree more on acceptance than on rejection. Several suggestions are made for improving the reliability and quality of peer review. Further research is needed, especially in the physical sciences.
Service managers implement customer satisfaction evaluation cards (CSECs) to help them better understand and serve their customers. Yet a robust finding from recent research is that consumers who expect to evaluate provide lower satisfaction ratings than customers who are asked to evaluate without prior notice. This article reports results of two experiments that examine the effects of expecting to evaluate (here, the CSEC effect) in the negative context of service failure. The experiments utilize thought-listing protocols to differentiate between vigilant processing (VPT) and negativity bias (NBT) theories and reinforce the internal validity of the CSEC effect. The studies also extend prior research by separating CSEC effects on evaluations of the service employee from CSEC effects on the service firm overall. Study 2 examines consequences of the CSEC effect not previously studied (switching, complaining, and negative word-of-mouth intentions) and extends external validity through an international replication. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
The prevalence of faulty citations impedes the growth of scientific knowledge. Faulty citations include omissions of relevant papers, incorrect references, and quotation errors that misreport findings. We discuss key studies in these areas. We then examine citations to “Estimating nonresponse bias in mail surveys,” one of the most frequently cited papers from the Journal of Marketing Research, to illustrate these issues. This paper is especially useful in testing for quotation errors because it provides specific operational recommendations on adjusting for nonresponse bias; therefore, it allows us to determine whether the citing papers properly used the findings. By any number of measures, those doing survey research fail to cite this paper and, presumably, make inadequate adjustments for nonresponse bias. Furthermore, even when the paper was cited, 49 of the 50 studies that we examined reported its findings improperly. The inappropriate use of statistical-significance testing led researchers to conclude that nonresponse bias was not present in 76 percent of the studies in our sample. Only one of the studies in the sample made any adjustment for it. Judging from the original paper, we estimate that the study researchers should have predicted nonresponse bias and adjusted for 148 variables. In this case, the faulty citations seem to have arisen either because the authors did not read the original paper or because they did not fully understand its implications. To address the problem of omissions, we recommend that journals include a section on their websites to list all relevant papers that have been overlooked and show how the omitted paper relates to the published paper. In general, authors should routinely verify the accuracy of their sources by reading the cited papers. For substantive findings, they should attempt to contact the authors for confirmation or clarification of the results and methods. This would also provide them with the opportunity to enquire about other relevant references. Journal editors should require that authors sign statements.
Linkage‐advertising is the literature and related materials given to customers who respond to advertisers' offers of these materials. Most print and much broadcast advertising in the United States and Canada includes direct‐response linkage‐advertising offers. However, the impact of linkage‐advertising on customers' cognitions, affections, purchases, and consumption behaviours is not well known. In this article we describe how quasi‐experiments can provide a more valid approach to learning the impacts of advertising than the more widely used single‐group case‐study approach. A destination‐marketing tourism strategy, its research method and results are described. This approach can be applied easily to other industry settings. A quasi‐experimental design was used on data from a field study to test the central hypotheses of linkage‐advertising effects. The results from the study are used to estimate the net return on investment of the total linkage‐advertising marketing program. We conclude with suggestions for additional advertising research using quasi‐experimental designs.
Résumé
Le “linkage advertising” (L.A.) est l'ensemble de l'information et des documents distribués aux consomma‐teurs ayant remarqué et répondu aux offres qui leur ont été faites de recevoir ces documents. La plupart des imprimés et des émissions publicitaires aux états‐Unis et au Canada comprennent des offres de réponse directe et de L.A. Cependant, l'impact du L.A. sur la cognition, l'affect et les achats des consommateurs reste peu connu. Dans le présent article, nous décrivons de quelle manière les quasi‐expérimentations nous permettent, mieux que l'étude habituelle d'un seul groupe, de saisir l'impact de la publicité sur les consommatuers. Les détails de la méthode et des résultats exposés sont ceux d'une stratégie de marketing d'une destination touris‐tique, stratégie facilement applicable à d'autres industries. Un design quasi‐expérimental a été utilisé pour recueillir des données permettant de tester l'hypothèse centrale des effets du L.A. Les résultats de la présente étude sont utilisés pour estimer le rendement net sur les investissements du programme de marketing total de L.A. Des suggestions de recherche future avec design quasi‐expérimental sont proposées.
Confirmatory bias is the tendency to emphasize and believe experiences which support one's views and to ignore or discredit those which do not. The effects of this tendency have been repeatedly documented in clinical research. However, its ramifications for the behavior of scientists have yet to be adequately explored. For example, although publication is a critical element in determining the contribution and impact of scientific findings, little research attention has been devoted to the variables operative in journal review policies. In the present study, 75 journal reviewers were asked to referee manuscripts which described identical experimental procedures but which reported positive, negative, mixed, or no results. In addition to showing poor interrater agreement, reviewers were strongly biased against manuscripts which reported results contrary to their theoretical perspective. The implications of these findings for epistemology and the peer review system are briefly addressed.
This study was made for two purposes. The first was to replicate the study of Sawyer and Howard (1991), which found that the effects of persuasion in open-ended advertisements were greater than those of closed-ended advertisements when the audience was involved in processing the ads. The second was to examine a potential boundary condition of these findings based on complexity of the product featured in the advertisement and the audience's ability to process the information. An experiment using 211 student subjects replicated the results of Sawyer and Howard when the same low-complexity product was featured in the target advertisement. However, the results of the analysis of variance (ANOVA) and logistic regression (LOGIT) analyses on four measures of persuasion (attitude toward the brand, effort, purchase intention, and choice) showed that the effects Sawyer and Howard found for their relatively simple product (razor) did not hold for a complex product (CD player) except for purchase intention. Further examination of the role of the subject's ability to process the complex product advertisement showed little difference from the over-all group in the complex product condition.
In this review we investigate what the available data on the predictive validity of peer review can add to our understanding of judgmental forecasting. We found that peer review attests to the relative success of judgmental forecasting by experts. Both manuscript and group-based peer review allow, on average, for accurate decisions to be made. However, tension exists between peer review and innovative ideas, even though the latter underlie scientific advance. This points to the danger of biases and preconceptions in judgments. We therefore formulate two proposals for enhancing the likelihood of innovative work.
Odd pricing is the ubiquitous practice of expressing a price so that it falls just below a round number. In this study, subjects were presented with a set of prices and were asked to recall those prices 2 days later. It was found that odd-ending prices are less likely than even-ending prices to be recalled accurately and that expressing a price as an odd-ending price increases the likelihood that it will be underestimated when it is recalled.
When donating to charitable causes, people do not value lives consistently. Money is often concentrated on a single victim even though more people would be helped, if resources were dispersed or spent protecting future victims. We examine the impact of deliberating about donation decisions on generosity. In a series of field experiments, we show that teaching or priming people to recognize the discrepancy in giving toward identifiable and statistical victims has perverse effects: individuals give less to identifiable victims but do not increase giving to statistical victims, resulting in an overall reduction in caring and giving. Thus, it appears that, when thinking deliberatively, people discount sympathy towards identifiable victims but fail to generate sympathy toward statistical victims.
A randomized, controlled trial (RCT) should not be started or interpreted without accounting for evidence from preceding RCTs addressing the same question. Research has suggested that evidence from prior trials is often not accounted for in reports of subsequent RCTs.
To assess the extent to which reports of RCTs cite prior trials studying the same interventions.
Meta-analyses published in 2004 that combined 4 or more trials were identified; within each meta-analysis, the extent to which each trial report cited the trials that preceded it by more than 1 year was assessed.
The proportion of prior trials that were cited (prior research citation index), the proportion of the total participants from prior trials that were in the cited trials (sample size citation index), and the absolute number of trials cited were calculated.
227 meta-analyses were identified, comprising 1523 trials published from 1963 to 2004. The median prior research citation index was 0.21 (95% CI, 0.18 to 0.24), meaning that less than one quarter of relevant reports were cited. The median sample size citation index (0.24 [CI, 0.21 to 0.27]) was similar, suggesting that larger trials were not selectively cited. Of the 1101 RCTs that had 5 or more prior trials to cite, 254 (23%) cited no prior RCTs and 257 (23%) cited only 1. The median number of prior cited trials was 2, which did not change as the number of citable trials increased. The mean number of preceding trials cited by trials published after 2000 was 2.4, compared with 1.5 for those published before 2000 (P < 0.001).
The investigators could not ascertain why prior trials were not cited, and noncited trials may have been taken into account in the trial design and proposal stages.
In reports of RCTs published over 4 decades, fewer than 25% of preceding trials were cited, comprising fewer than 25% of the participants enrolled in all relevant prior trials. A median of 2 trials was cited, regardless of the number of prior trials that had been conducted. Research is needed to explore the explanations for and consequences of this phenomenon. Potential implications include ethically unjustifiable trials, wasted resources, incorrect conclusions, and unnecessary risks for trial participants.
None.
Previous research into the use of explicit and implicit conclusions in advertising has yet to demonstrate
consistent effects for both brand attitudes and purchase intentions. While research has examined the role of involvement, this study contributes by examining the trait called need for cognition (NFC), which addresses a person’s propensity to engage in effortful thinking. In addition, this study introduces argument quality (AQ) as another potential moderator of conclusion explicitness effects. In a 2 × 2 experiment of 261 subjects, conclusion explicitness (explicit conclusion, implicit conclusion) and AQ (strong, weak) are manipulated, with NFC (high NFC, low NFC) as a third measured variable. Results indicate more favorable evaluations for implicit conclusions over explicit conclusions for high-NFC individuals. Further, implicit conclusions result in more favorable brand attitudes and purchase intentions when linked with strong AQ for high-NFC individuals. The findings confirm that conclusion explicitness does not differentially affect the evaluations
of low-NFC subjects. Results suggest that NFC may represent an important moderating variable for future conclusion
explicitness research.
Contenido: Mercadotecnia integrada y su papel en el mejoramiento de la marca; Mercadotecnia integrada desde la perspectiva del consumidor, persuasión y objetivos; Nuevos productos, nombres de marcas, y publicidad del punto de venta; Administración de la publicidad; Administración de la promoción de ventas, relaciones públicas y patrocinios; Presiones externas en mercadotecnia.
While conventional farming systems face serious problems of sustainability, organic agriculture is seen as a more environmentally friendly system as it favours renewable resources, recycles nutrients, uses the environment’s own systems for controlling pests and diseases, sustains ecosystems, protects soils, and reduces pollution. At the same time organic farming promotes animal welfare, the use of natural foodstuffs, product diversity and the avoidance of waste, among other practices. However, the future of organic agriculture will depend on its economic viability and on the determination shown by governments to protect these practices. This paper performs panel regressions with a sample of Catalan farms (Spain) to test the influence of organic farming on farm output, costs and incomes. It analyses the cost structures of both types of farming and comments on their social and environmental performance.
Analysis of the rightmost digits of selling prices in a sample of retail price advertisements confirmed past findings indicating the overrepresentation of the digits 0, 5, and 9. The high cognitive accessibility of round numbers can account for the overrepresentation of 0- and 5-ending prices and suggests the existence of two effects that could account for the overrepresentation of 9-ending prices: (1) a tendency of consumers to perceive a 9-ending price as a round-number price with a small amount given back and (2) a tendency of consumers to underestimate a 9-ending price by encoding it as the first round number evoked during incomplete left-to-right processing. Analysis of the patterns of rightmost digits observed in the sample provides supportive evidence particularly for the second of these two 9-ending effects. Copyright 1997 by the University of Chicago.
An experiment investigated the relation between inference and persuasion. Subjects were exposed to an ad in which presence or absence of conclusions and level of involvement were manipulated orthogonally. Omitted conclusions were more likely to be inferred spontaneously in high than in low involvement conditions. Further, when conclusions were omitted and high involvement made spontaneous inference formation likely, brand attitudes were more favorable and accessible than attitudes formed in low involvement conditions. Brand attitudes based on spontaneous inferences were as favorable and more accessible than attitudes formed in explicit conclusion conditions. The effects of motivation and effort on inference are discussed.