The effect of perceived message choice on persuasion

We argue that giving individuals a sense of choice over the product information they receive (i.e., message choice) can have important subsequent effects when individuals are prompted to make inferences about the company. Even when the product information that is received is exactly the same, being given a sense of choice can produce more favorable company evaluations and in turn, more favorable product judgments. The first two experiments support these hypotheses using different means of prompting company inferences: when prompted, those who had been given message choice judged the company more favorably and were more willing to purchase from that company. The third experiment illustrates when message choice effects can backfire. Specifically, when the company itself highlights the provision of message choice in the ad, and consumers are prompted to make inferences about the company, message choice can backfire because it may be perceived as a persuasion tactic rather than a sincere attempt to inform. The results support company evaluations as the mediator of message choice effects and rule out alternate accounts based on dissonance, elaboration, reactance and self-labeling explanations. These findings are important in interactive media environments where marketers have opportunities and imperatives to give consumers a sense of choice in message selection.     

Contextual contrast and perceived knowledge: Exploring the implications for persuasion

The present research tested the notion that perceived target knowledge can be affected by the amount of information one has about other recently encountered stimuli—whether that information is relevant or not. Furthermore, the present research tested the implications of this effect for persuasion. In 4 experiments, participants were presented with a persuasive message promoting a fictitious department store, but first received another message containing more or less information about something else (e.g., another store, a car, or a person). Regardless of the type or valence of initial information received, the initial message had a contrast effect on perceived target knowledge, which influenced target attitudes. The less information the initial message contained, the more persuasive knowledge participants thought they received from the target message, and the more their attitudes agreed with that message. These findings suggest that the perceived amount of persuasive information one has about a target stimulus can be manipulated to increase persuasion, even when the actual amount of information about the target stimulus does not vary.     

The hybrid split ad technique and onsite rewards

With a ‘split ad’, information is presented as two distinct parts, such as when two short commercials for a given brand are separated by other television content. Two studies are presented in this paper which demonstrate the advantages of an emerging form of the split ad strategy, which is termed the ‘hybrid split ad’ technique. Using this approach, a message typically begins in a traditional medium and then concludes at a website. In Experiment 1, the hybrid split ad technique is shown to enhance attitudes towards an advertised product by increasing the perceived importance of favourable attributes provided at the website. Experiment 2 replicates this finding and also addresses an issue of managerial importance, namely, how to motivate consumers to pursue the second (web‐based) portion of the ad. Offering consumers an incentive at the website is useful in this regard, provided that the incentive is small enough not to undermine the positive effects of the hybrid split ad.     

Advertising effectiveness as a function of numerical support: From majority compliance to minority conversion

In an experiment, we manipulated numerical support (majority versus minority versus absence of support) for advertising commercials and examined its effects at both manifest and latent levels. Results indicated that commercials induce greater manifest influence when receiving majority support and greater latent influence under minority support. In a second study, minority support for commercials was held constant while the modality of comparison between source and target was manipulated (independence versus negative interdependence). Results revealed that latent influence occurs only when the social comparison is independent. These results and their implications for the conception of advertising campaigns are discussed with regard to the conversion theory and the dissociation process.     

Are all experiences of fit created equal? Two paths to persuasion

Regulatory fit influences the effectiveness of persuasion through two paths: 1) a “feeling right” as “feeling good about the target” effect where feeling right is a positive feeling that transfers positivity directly to the target, similar to “feelings as information” or fluency effects, and 2) a “feeling right” as “feeling confident about the evaluation” effect where feeling right is feeling confident about one's evaluative judgments of the target that increases reliance on those evaluations. We propose that the involvement with an attitude-related issue in a persuasion message is one key factor that determines when each effect will occur. Five studies demonstrate that under high involvement, fit increased reliance on evaluative reactions to the target, making a target of a positive advocacy message evaluated as more positive and a target of a negative advocacy message evaluated as more negative; and under low involvement, fit increased the positivity of feelings toward the target regardless of the valence of the message advocacy, making the evaluation of the target more positive for either a positive or negative advocacy message.     

The role of overt head movement and attention in persuasion

This study examined the effect of overt head movement on attitudes toward a product. In a headphones test, participants were required to listen to music and to either nod or shake their heads. Some participants listened to a CD of music; other participants listened to a CD of the same music and a persuasive message about the headphones. Overt head movement affected participants' product choice and price perception when they were presented with the music and a persuasive message. The findings are interpreted to suggest that head movement can be instrumental in participants' product evaluation if the head movement is directed or focused on the attitude object.     

Changing Gender Roles in Prime-Time Commercials in Malaysia,Japan, Taiwan,and the United States

This study showed that during prime time, a new paradigm of gender role depiction has emerged in prime-time commercials in Japan, Taiwan, and Malaysia. Even though some stereotypes about the presentation of gender in commercials persist (for setting, product type, voice-over), the study found an equal number of males and females appearing as primary characters in commercials during prime time. In Japan, Malaysia, and Taiwan, the majority of commercials depicted males and females in nonstereotypical gender roles. Some shifts were also observed for role depiction in prime-time commercials in the United States. Reasons for these changes are discussed.     

The Perpetuation of Subtle Prejudice: Race and Gender Imagery in 1990s Television Advertising

Scholars have long argued that popular consumer culture is both producer and product of social inequality, but few detailed empirical studies have explored the ways that advertising imagery simultaneously constructs stereotypes of race and gender. This article reports on a content analysis of television commercials (n = 1699) aired on programs with high ratings for specific target audiences from 1992 to 1994. Characters in the television commercials enjoy more prominence and exercise more authority if they are White or men. Logistic regression analyses indicate that images of romantic and domestic fulfillment also differ by race and gender, with women and Whites disproportionately shown in family settings and in cross-sex interactions. In general, 1990s television commercials tend to portray White men as powerful, white women as sex objects, African American men as aggressive, and African American women as inconsequential. The authors suggest that these commercial images contribute to the perpetuation of subtle prejudice against African Americans by exaggerating cultural differences and denying positive emotions. Results are discussed in relation to the segmentation of media markets and possibilities for social change.     

Serial position effects in recall of television commercials

Does the position of a television commercial in a block of commercials determine how well it will be recalled? The findings of naturalistic studies can be affected by uncontrolled presentation, viewing, and retention variables. In the present article, college students viewed lists of 15 commercials in a laboratory simulation and recalled the product brand names. In an immediate test, the first commercials in a list were well recalled (a primacy effect), as were the last items (a recency effect), in comparison with the recall of middle items. In an end-of-session test, the primacy effect persisted, but the recency effect disappeared. Embedding lists within a television program again produced better recall of the first items during end-of-session tests of recall and recognition. These results offered convergent validity for the naturalistic studies of commercial memory, and they supported the usefulness of combining laboratory and field methods to answer questions about everyday memory.     

Hooked on a feeling: The effect of music tempo on attitudes and the mediating role of consumers' affective responses

With today's high degree of advertising clutter, marketers might greatly focus on evoking emotion or creating hedonic (e.g., feeling) experiences for consumers in order to improve practice. These strategies minimize the effort needed to process a message and can influence consumers' decisions. In 4 studies, we examine the effects of music tempo on consumers' attitudes toward the brand while further considering the mediating role of evoked feelings. Study 1 and 2 supports that music tempo in commercials influences consumers' affective response to the music in advertising. Study 3 replicated this effect using a controlled experiment and extended the research by demonstrating that tempo also affects general mood states, in addition to feelings evoked by the music. Last, Study 4 demonstrates that need for emotion moderates the role of affect as information. This research contributes to theory in sensory marketing and consumer behavior and offers practical implications to improve marketing practice.     

诱导效应的影响机制——产品感知风险的调节作用

为了探究以往消费者受情境诱导的影响程度不同的原因,本研究从产品感知风险的角度阐述诱导效应的作用机制。用2×2的因子设计,检验产品感知风险和诱导情形对目标产品选择概率的交互作用。188名被试的实验结果显示高感知风险产品类型下诱导效应显著,而低感知风险产品类型下诱导效应不显著。进一步分析得出目标产品相对吸引力是诱导情形与目标产品选择概率的关系链中的中介变量,而产品的感知风险是有中介的调节变量的研究结论。     

An Asian Perspective on the Portrayal of Men and Women in Television Advertisements: Studies From Hong Kong and Indonesian Television

This paper reports on 2 studies with almost identical methodologies. Both were content analysis studies of the way that men and women are portrayed on television (TV) in South East Asia. One study was conducted in Hong Kong, where 175 TV advertisements were content analyzed. The other was conducted in Indonesia, where 119 TV advertisements were content analyzed. In Hong Kong, 9 of the 10 content categories yielded a significant gender-role effect, particularly mode of presentation, credibility, and role. In Indonesia, 9 of the 11 gender-role effects were significant, particularly reward type and product type. The fact that Asian TV commercials seem to have greater gender-role stereotypes than do Western commercials is discussed. Difficulties associated with cross-cultural comparisons of this type of data are discussed.     

Female “Thin Ideal” Media Images and Boys' Attitudes Toward Girls

Both boys and girls are exposed repeatedly to “thin-ideal” images in the media, that is, images of unrealistically thin and attractive women. As yet, however, little research has examined the impact of these images on boys. In the present study we investigated the effect of exposure to televised thin-ideal images on boys' attitudes toward girls. The participants were 354 boys aged 13–15 years, who viewed either 20 commercials that epitomized the thin-ideal for women or 20 commercials that contained no such images. They then rated the importance of 10 characteristics, including slimness and physical attractiveness, in their choice of partner or girlfriend. Appearance schematicity, a trait measure of the extent of investment in appearance as the basis for self-evaluation, was also assessed. It was found that schematicity was positively related to boys' importance ratings of attractiveness, slimness, athletic ability, muscularity, and popularity in a girlfriend. Further, boys who scored medium (but not high or low) on appearance schematicity were influenced by the commercials. These findings suggest that the media may have an indirect impact on girls' body image through influence on boys' expectations and evaluations of girls' appearance.     

The Effects of Gender-Stereotyped Radio Commercials1

It is well established that mass-media content often presents strong traditional gender stereotypes, but relatively little is known of the effects of exposure to such content. This study investigates the impact of gender-stereotyped radio commercials on listeners' self-ratings of masculinity and femininity and on the efficiency with which they performed memory tasks that included gender-stereotyped trait terms. No effect on self-rating was obtained. Clear effects on information processing efficiency were found, with participants exposed to the stereotyped commercials showing superior performance on memory for trait words and on a secondary task. It is concluded that repetitive exposure to gender stereotypes via the media does promote the accessibility of stereotype-related cognitions.     

Talking about visually perceived events: Communication effects on eyewitness memory

Communicators' tuning of a message about a social target to their audience's evaluation can shape their representation of the target. This audience‐tuning effect has been demonstrated with ambiguous text passages as input material. We examined whether the effect also occurs when communicators learn about the target's behaviours from visual (nonverbal) input material. In Experiment 1, participants watched a soundless video depicting ambiguous behaviours of a target, described the video to an audience who liked (vs. disliked) the target, and subsequently recalled the video. Both message and recall were biased towards the audience's judgement. In Experiment 2, the video depicted a forensically relevant event, specifically ambiguous behaviours of two persons involved in a bar brawl. Participants tuned their event retellings to their audience's responsibility judgement and remembered the event accordingly. In both experiments, the effect of the audience's judgement on recall was statistically mediated by the extent to which the message was tuned to the audience. The more participants experienced a shared reality with their audience the stronger was the message‐recall correlation (Experiment 2). We conclude that the audience‐tuning effect for visually perceived information depends on the communicators' creation of a shared reality with their audience. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Differential information use for near and distant decisions

Whether choosing a cell phone, a senator, or a kitchen appliance, consumers today quickly find themselves awash in information from commercials, magazines, and websites. Whereas some of this information is broad, decontextualized, and abstracted across multiple individuals and instances, other information is more closely tied to a single experience within one specific context. The present research asks: under what circumstances do people rely on abstracted averages, and when are they swayed by another individual’s particular experience? Across three studies, we show that temporal distance increases the relative weight placed on aggregate vs. individualized information when participants are asked to choose between two sleeping pills, migraine medications, or kitchen appliances, and that this process impacts not only evaluation but also willingness to pay and choice. Potential implications for evaluation, decision-making, and base-rate utilization are discussed.     

Through rose-tinted glasses: How inducing and resolving curiosity makes consumers less skeptical and improves their product evaluations

Research indicates that in general, curiosity leads to more intense processing of an advertisement, which might result in a more skeptical response toward a persuasive message. However, we propose the opposite and argue that a process of evoking curiosity toward a stimulus in the first step (with the creation of an information gap) and resolving it in the second step creates a positive affective experience. Upon receiving curiosity-resolving information after becoming curious, consumers are less skeptical toward the advertised product, which leads to a more favorable attitude and a higher purchase intention. Based on four studies, we demonstrate curiosity's skepticism-reducing effect, its downstream consequences, and the underlying mechanism of positive affect. We show that this curiosity-stimulating way of information disclosure caused the effect instead of the information itself, which remained constant. The effects occur for integral curiosity, directed at the focal product, and for incidental curiosity, elicited by an unrelated stimulus. These results contribute to understanding consumer responses to curiosity-evoking advertisements, which are widespread, and provide implications for consumer psychologists, practitioners, and policy makers.     

Suspense and Advertising Responses

Suspense is a cognitive and emotional reaction that is evoked by time‐dependent structural characteristics of an unfolding dramatic narrative. Suspense within narratives is defined and its structural antecedents, based on characteristics of suspense that have been studied within the context of film and fiction, are identified. Results of three studies offer evidence that suspenseful commercials can be identified and discriminated from other types of commercials. As they watch, viewers of suspenseful commercials show a combination of hope and fear emotional responses. A parameter of online hope and fear responses is positively correlated with attitude toward the ad for suspenseful, but not for nonsuspenseful, commercials. Perceptions of suspense‐related characteristics predict attitude toward the ad for suspenseful commercials, but are 1 of several predictors for nonsuspenseful commercials. A negative aspect of suspenseful commercials is that there is less brand–content integration.     

The Diagnosticity of Advertising Generated Brand Attitudes in Brand Choice Contexts

Advertising theory tends to presume, sometimes implicitly, that advertising mediates brand choice through its effect on brand attitudes. This article addresses the limitation of using brand attitude measures at or near the time of advertising exposure to predict the relative ability of a set of alternative advertising message appeals to directly influence brand‐choice decisions. The results suggest that the ability of advertising‐generated brand attitudes to predict advertising effects on brand choice declines when (a) consumers’ motivation to deliberate is greater at the time of brand choice than at the time of attitude formation, (b) the message appeal of the brand assigned the most favorable attitude rating is not accessible, not perceived to be at least as diagnostic as competitor appeals, or both, and (c) attitude differences among brand alternatives are small.     

Can the effectiveness of health promotion campaigns be improved using self-efficacy and self-affirmation interventions? An analysis of sun protection messages

Health-risk communications frequently target self-efficacy in order to encourage adaptive responses. Research has also indicated that self-affirmation may be a useful supplementary or alternative intervention technique. This study compared the effects of self-efficacy, self-affirmation and a combination of these techniques for two risk messages. Young British females (N=677) read about ultraviolet light and skin cancer or skin ageing ('photoageing') and were randomly assigned to a single intervention (self-affirmation/self-efficacy), the combined intervention or no intervention. The efficacy intervention led to greater message acceptance and perceived risk in both the cancer and photoageing conditions, while the only main effect of self-affirmation was on acceptance of the photoageing message. However, self-affirmation moderated the effect of efficacy information. For photoageing messages, efficacy information was associated with greater message acceptance only amongst self-affirmed participants, but the opposite occurred for skin cancer messages. Although these findings should be interpreted cautiously, they imply that health promoters should select efficacy information if only one intervention is used but that self-affirmation can influence responsiveness to efficacy interventions for particular messages.