Search results

This study explores the effect of gender stereotyping and issue advocacy on consumer sentiment toward advertising and brands.

Drawing from the literature, the study hypothesizes about the impact of gender stereotyping and consumer advocacy on consumer sentiment. A behavioral experiment tests the hypotheses and provides support for the main conclusions.

Results indicate that issue advocacy can cancel the negative effect of traditional female stereotyping. The results also show that demographics are not necessarily the reason why a person favors or condemns stereotyping and advertising; on the contrary, any reaction is far more linked to personal disposition.

The findings of this research have implications for marketing and advertising practice. While the use of issue advocacy is currently trending up, there is still a lack of understanding about its effect on consumers. Gender stereotyping is also being frequently used, but has caused huge backlashes in recent ad campaigns. Marketing and advertising managers can use insights from this research to shape advertising messages that use these two stimuli in order to enable a brand to better connect with its audience and achieve a more desirable outcome.

The paper contributes to the academic discussion about the effectiveness of using gender stereotyping and issue advocacy to drive advertising outcomes. It challenges the idea that the combination of these two advertising approaches is either detrimental or beneficial to the brand.

Despite prior studies, little has been done to understand the advertising carry-over effect. The purpose of this study is to investigate the heterogeneous attributes of the carry-over effect by focusing on the differences between franchise and non-franchise firms.

The data were retrieved from the Compustat database and annual corporate financial reports (10-K) for five representative franchise industries from 1980 to 2009. Ultimately, 185 firms were included and 1,592 firm-year observations were analysed. This study used a Panel VAR (Vector Autoregression) to examine the effects of advertising on firm performance. We can control endogenous effects using Panel VAR, which also allows us to control unobserved firm-specific heterogeneity.

This study found that advertising had no effect on sales growth or brand equity in the long run for non-franchise firms and further confirmed that non-franchise firms incur agency costs. In contrast, the effect of advertising on sales growth and brand equity was significant for franchise firms. A carry-over effect of advertising on brand equity was detected for franchise firms, but sales growth rapidly decreased after two years.

Even though franchise firms retain the carry-over effect of advertising on brand equity, franchisors should carefully monitor market trends and their sales growth because sales growth rapidly decreased after two years.

This study incorporated the concepts of the delayed response effect and the customer holdover effect to better understand the advertising carry-over effect. From the results, this study proposed a more detailed concept of carry-over effects for further studies. From this perspective, this study makes both academic and industrial contributions.

After receiving advertising messages, most consumers rarely purchase the advertised products at once, which results in a delay between advertising exposure and its effect. This paper is devoted to exploring the advertising decision and coordination issues for a supply chain system subject to advertising immediate and delayed effects.

By applying the game theory, the differential game models with delay are constructed for the supply chain to examine the equilibrium advertising efforts, brand goodwill and the optimal profits under the different cooperation situations. A class of transfer payment contracts is designed to achieve the best outcome of the supply chain. Illustrative examples are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of addressed results and provide some managerial perspectives.

It can be found that the complete cooperation situation can stimulate the advertising investment, drive the product demand and improve the economic profit. Also, a class of transfer payment contracts is designed in this paper, such that the supply chain can perfectly realize the profit maximization, and each member can achieve the Pareto improvement.

This work does not address the random market environment, which can be filled in the future. Furthermore, this paper has been done in a single supply chain structure. It is an interesting future line of research when taking competitive behavior (e.g. competition among manufacturers, retailers or supply chains) into account.

This study will help managers make advertising strategies, advise an optimal cooperation way and design the coordination contracts to ensure the economic development of the supply chain. These obtained conclusions may provide a valuable decision-support for marketing management.

For a supply chain, the most previous literature about dynamic advertising models focused on a single advertising effect-immediate effect. This work explores advertising strategy with double advertising effects and investigates the coordinating power of new transfer payment contracts.

To discover whether there are market segments for the fashion industry that cut across countries and respond differently to advertising messages.

A survey was administered to Korean, European, and US female consumers. Cluster analysis is used in an attempt to identify lifestyle segments that cut across cultures.

Four cross‐national market segments are identified. These segments can be labeled as follows: “information seekers,” “sensation seekers,” “utilitarian consumers,” and “conspicuous consumers.” Findings also reveal that fashion lifestyle segment had a stronger effect on the reaction to a set of three ads for a major global fashion company (one each from the French, Korean, and US editions of Vogue magazine) than did consumer nationality.

Findings suggest that it is viable and perhaps desirable for global marketers in the fashion industry to target cross‐national market segments as opposed to developing individual segmentation schemes for each country.

Relatively few studies examining the viability of cross‐national segmentation have been studies. The study provides insight on building global brand equity and suggests standardized advertising is appropriate for some fashion marketers.

Skippable video advertising offers users the option to skip directly to their desired video content after viewing a limited amount of advertising and is becoming a format increasingly preferred by advertisers. This study constructed a mediator model based on advertising attitude to examine the influence of users' perceived control and perceived intrusiveness on brand attitude and advertising avoidance intention in skippable video ads.

The study considered the structural equation model using a self-reporting measure method. The research model was tested using a sample of 302 respondents.

The results showed that perceived control positively affected ad and brand attitude and negatively affected advertising avoidance intention. Perceived intrusiveness negatively affected attitudes toward the advertising and the brand but positively affected advertising avoidance intention. Ad attitude and brand attitude had no significant influence on advertising avoidance intention. The results also confirmed that ad attitude mediates the path from perceived control and intrusiveness to brand attitude.

This study further enriches the theoretical development of skippable video ads and expands the perspective and scope of interactive advertising research.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of interactivity and game-product congruence on the players’ feelings of presence and their brand attitude in the context of in-game advertising. Specifically, this research illustrates the conditions under which the brand placements in digital games create attention, engagement, subsequent feelings of presence and brand attitude by drawing the insights from the “limited capacity model of attention,” the “vividness effects theory” and the “transportation theory.”

A 2 (interactivity: high or low)×2 (game-product congruence: high or low) between-subject measures design is used. In total, 152 students participated in the study. A 2×2 between-subjects multivariate analysis of variance is used to test the hypotheses.

The results reveal that for a high game-product congruent game, high interactivity results in greater levels of feelings of presence than a low-interactivity condition. However, for a low game-product congruent game, both high- and low-interactivity conditions result in the same level of presence. Furthermore, the findings also show that for a high game-product congruent game, high interactivity results in more favorable brand attitude than a low-interactivity condition. On the other hand, for a low game-product congruent game, both high- and low-interactivity conditions result in the same level of brand attitude.

This paper provides implications for theory as well as practice by providing the empirical evidence of the combined effect of game-product congruence and interactivity on feelings of presence and brand attitude from the perspectives of attention, engagement and transportation of experiences in an emerging marketing context like India. The findings are useful for marketing practitioners in terms of effective in-game advertising, designing and execution. Future research can be conducted by exploring the in-game advertising effects of various other variables, such as product-involvement, game-involvement or game-repetition.

This investigation contributes to the literature of non-traditional advertising media, specifically to the area of branded entertainment, like brand placements in digital games by examining and exploring the influence of game-specific factors on the players’ feelings of presence and brand attitudes. Moreover, this paper is one of the first to reveal the real-time roles of game-specific factors in creating gamers’ feelings of presence and brand attitude from the perspectives of attention, engagement and transportation of experience in an emerging market context like India.

Extant research on comparative advertising has focused only on “market leader” comparisons (a brand targeting the market leader), whereas in the marketplace, “multi-brand” comparisons are more prevalent (Kalro et al., 2010). Moreover, most research focuses on direct comparisons only. Hence, this research aims to investigate the interplay between comparison ad strategy (“market leader”/“multi-brand” comparisons) and comparison ad format (direct/indirect comparisons) on the effectiveness of comparative advertising.

This paper uses four 2 × 2 fully crossed factorial designs (comparison ad format: direct vs indirect and comparison ad strategy: market leader vs multi brand) with established and new brands in two categories: powdered detergents and smart phones. All studies were conducted in metropolitan cities of India.

By and large, the experiments indicated that direct (indirect) comparisons lowered (heightened) perceived manipulative intent and enhanced (reduced) attitude-toward-the-ad for multi-brand (market leader) comparisons.

Findings suggest that when advertisers use comparative advertising, they may use direct ads when using multi-brand comparisons and use indirect ones when using market leader comparisons. It could also be argued that when advertisers use multi-brand comparisons because of fragmentation in the marketplace, they may directly compare against these multiple brands. When advertisers need to compare against a market leader, they may do so indirectly.

This research is among the first to investigate multi-brand comparisons that are widely used in the industry and that too in the context of both direct and indirect comparison formats.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an understanding of the effects of advertising based on economic cycles. To comprehend advertising effects in the restaurant industry from an economic cycle perspective, this study investigated both short- and long-run advertising effects under periods of economic contraction and expansion and compared those effects between the two economic periods.

The data were collected from the COMPUSTAT database for the restaurant industry (SIC 5,812) from 1979 to 2010. To estimate the economic cycles, the 2005 year-based real gross domestic product (GDP) was used from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Also, all variables were depreciated by the value of the US dollar in 2005. For estimation, a single equation error correction model was used to examine the short-term and long-term effects of advertising.

The results of this study indicated that both the short- and long-term effects of advertising on sales growth were more obvious in contraction periods than in expansion periods. However, the short-run effects of advertising on brand equity did not significantly differ between expansion and contraction periods. Further, the long-term effects of advertising on brand equity were greater in expansion periods than in contraction periods. The findings suggest that restaurant firms should not reduce their advertising budgets during periods of economic contraction to take advantage of superior sales growth outcomes during these periods.

The results of this study provide restaurant managers with useful practical implications. During economic contraction periods, restaurant managers should not reduce advertising budgets to take an ascendant position in terms of sales growth. Though the net positive effect at year t + 1 of contraction periods was smaller than that of expansion periods for sales growth, this is temporal and the long-run positive effect on sales growth spreads into future periods. Thus, a counter-cyclical advertising strategy could compensate for reduced sales from weak customer demands during economic contraction periods.

There have been many empirical studies on the advertising effect in the literature. However, this study examined whether the effects of advertising differ between economic expansion and contraction periods. This specificity is helpful for industrial practitioners as well as academic researchers.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which cultural differences and slogan meaning type affect the role of comprehension in attitude toward the ad (A_ad) and attitude toward the brand (A_brand) formation.

In an online experiment, a total of 256 adult participants from the USA (ranged in age from 19 to 26 years old) and 184 participants from France (ranged in age from 18 to 28) were randomly assigned to one of the two conditions (slogan: single meaning vs polysemous) in a between-subjects experimental design. After getting exposed to the ad, participants responded to questions related to their A_ad, A_brand, comprehension, uncertainty avoidance and demographics.

Results from this research demonstrate the moderating effect of uncertainty avoidance and slogan type (single meaning vs polysemous) on the relationship between comprehension and A_ad. The authors show that for polysemous (and not single meaning) slogans, comprehension results in more favorable A_ad for low uncertainty avoidance individuals than for high uncertainty avoidance individuals. In addition, the authors demonstrate the mediating effect of A_ad in the relationship between comprehension and A_brand.

The authors used nationality as a proxy for culture. Future research should include other cultural dimensions in the development of conceptual models and analysis of data. Another limitation is that the authors used a college student sample for this research. A more representative sample should be used in future research to examine cultural differences in interpreting adverting messages. One other limitation concerns the measurement tool the authors used to measure objective versus subjective comprehension in this research. While the theoretical foundations of the two modes of comprehension are clear and robust, improved measurement tools can enhance the validity and reliability of future research. Finally, the authors suggest that future research examine the effect of such variables as figure-ground contrast, figure attractiveness, stimulus repetition, prototypicality, symmetry and semantic or visual priming that may impact the processing of brand slogans.

This study argues that the processing of brand slogans in advertising is impacted by culture. Individuals from different cultures perceive and comprehend brand slogans differently. This study contributes to the research stream that examines the influence of cultural dimensions on the effectiveness of advertising by focusing more precisely on the impact of uncertainty avoidance (one of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions). In the case of single meaning slogans, advertisers might diminish the use of objective comprehension advertising strategies to influence both individuals with high and low uncertainty avoidance. In the case of polysemous slogans, advertisers should consider that consumers with high uncertainty avoidance (vs low uncertainty avoidance) are impacted more by subjective comprehension (vs objective comprehension) when forming A_ad and A_brand.

This research contributes meaningfully to the marketing literature by examining previous work on ad slogan processing through subjective vs objective comprehension and extending the analysis by incorporating culture as an important factor.

The primary question motivating this study is how message characteristics influence the persuasiveness of celebrity athlete endorsements as used in print advertising for a sports drink. In particular, this study examines the extent to which celebrity endorsement of a product influences the effectiveness of advertising under varying degrees of perceived fit between the celebrity and the product image. The findings indicate that the process of integrating endorsement strength with given endorsers and products can substantially enhance the effectiveness of celebrity advertising. It is found that the interactive effect of endorsement strength and celebrity-product match is more pronounced among consumers with high product involvement than among those with low involvement.