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For many developing country citizens, traditional herbal medicines offer affordable alternatives to expensive orthodox options. Consumers learn about them from different sources including the packaging, which by regulatory demands must provide certain information. In countries such as Ghana, many herbal medicine brands combine packaging information with radio presenter mentions (PMs) as the primary modes of advertising. The purpose of this study is to compare radio PMs of herbal medicines to their packaging information to see how consistent they are in providing credible information to consumers.

The study uses comparative qualitative content analysis to compare information about disease indications, directions for use and warnings/cautions as provided on the packaging and in PMs to gauge the extent of their congruence.

Findings show that there are substantial cross-channel message differences. These differences range from under-representation to sometimes, blatant misinformation, suggesting the possibility that audiences will have difficulty relying on them for decisions.

This study only addressed issues with the manifest content of herbal drugs’ packaging and PMs. It does not include any interviews with consumers to gauge the extent of their consciousness of the lapses identified, and how they are affected by such. In addition, the study sample is context-specific. Ghana presents an interesting setting for the study but it is none-the-less only one country, denying us the power to generalize the findings.

The study points to a need to pay closer attention to message salience and consistency where multiple channels are used in promoting herbal medicinal products. Due to their historically traditional context of consumption in many developing countries, regulatory frameworks on herbal medicine markets are often lax. This study calls attention to a need for better policing on how herbal medicinal products promote themselves, particularly where they use multiple media channels that introduce variations into their messages.

The study calls attention to the credibility of cross-channel messages in supporting consumers of medicinal products. Secondly, because of the predominance of the normative view in medical advertising, channels such as PMs that accommodate message variation and improvisation have eluded critical analysis. By its focus on the presenter mention advertising format, the study also draws attention of health communication scholars to begin to include emerging modes of medical advertising in their analysis.

Contemporary sales scholarship suggests that salespersons pursuing customer satisfaction should improvise (think and act on their feet) to find solutions to customers’ emergent problems. A missing link in this literature, however, is the relational context within which improvisation takes place and becomes effective. This study aims to examine how the tone of the salesperson–customer relationship (whether cordial or coercive) drives and conditions salesperson improvisation and its implications for customer satisfaction.

The study tests the proposed model using dyadic salesperson–customer data from business-to-business (B2B) markets in Ghana. The relationships are tested using structural equation modeling technique.

The study finds that salesperson improvisation is associated with customer satisfaction. It also finds the extent of cordiality between salespersons and their customers predicts but does not enhance the value of improvisation for customer satisfaction. The reverse is true for customer exercised coercive power which is not a significant driver of improvisation but can substantially alter its benefits for the worse.

By implication, salespersons should improvise more to be able to satisfy customers. However, such improvisation must be tempered with a consciousness of the relationship shared with customers and the level of power they exercise in the relationship.

Because improvised behavior deviates from routines and may be unsettling for customers, improvising salespersons must first understand whether their customers would be willing to accommodate such deviations. Yet, the literature is silent on this relational context surrounding improvisation. This study, by exploring facilitating and inhibitory relational variables implicated in improvisation, addresses this gap.