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This chapter provides an overview of what is currently known in the scientific literature about the effects of disclosures of sponsored content on consumers’ responses.

We provide a qualitative literature review of 21 empirical studies.

Awareness of disclosures is rather low, but when consumers are aware of a disclosure, it successfully activates persuasion knowledge and can increase brand memory. The literature shows inconclusive findings with respect to the effects of disclosures on attention paid to sponsored content, critical processing, brand attitudes, and purchase intentions. In addition, the literature shows that modality of the disclosure has no significant effects, but the content of the disclosure, its timing, its duration, receivers’ moods, and their perceptions of the sponsored content or the endorser are important moderators.

More research is needed on differences in effects of disclosures in different media and on disclosures of online sponsored content online (e.g., sponsored tweets and vlogs).

This chapter provides advertisers with insights on how disclosures affect the persuasiveness of sponsored content in several media.

For legislators, explicit guidelines on how to create effective disclosures of sponsored content are provided. For example, to increase persuasion knowledge, disclosures should be portrayed for at least 3 seconds and if logos are used, they should be accompanied by texts explaining the logo.

This overview is a valuable starting point for future academic research in the domain of disclosure effects and provides insights for advertisers and legislators.

The authors ask whether individuals tasked with persuading others have distinct and important concerns regarding their occupational stress and well-being. The authors argue that a well-known model from the marketing literature – the persuasion knowledge model (PKM; Friestad & Wright, 1994) – illuminates a number of issues for future study. The authors further argue for a number of extensions to the PKM to account for the persuasion agent’s side of the interaction. Next, the authors consider potential stressors that are distinctive to the persuasion encounter, as well as the strategies that persuasion agents engage to cope. This discussion reveals a number of potential negative consequences for the agents themselves, as well as their employing firms and customers. Finally, the authors present some thoughts on what persuasion agents, their managers, and external regulators can do to mitigate these negative consequences.

Cognitive literary criticism is introduced as a bridge between cognitive approaches to the study of persuasion, and literary traditions in consumer research. As a successor to reader-response theory, cognitive literary theory focuses on the cognitive processes of interpretation, while keeping an eye on the aesthetic properties of the text. Paradigmatically cautious researchers might shy away from attempts to marry positivist cognitive constructs to interpretivist cultural theory, but this chapter argues that these qualms also conceal missed opportunities for the study of persuasion.

Insights from cognitive literary criticism are demonstrated at the hand of a LEGO ad.

Theory of mind and conceptual blending are crucial cognitive skills involved in the interpretation of persuasive texts.

Most research to date has kept literary and cognitive approaches to persuasion separate, black-boxing the processes of persuasion. This chapter argues for a revitalization of interest in aesthetic detail, informed by insights from cognitive science.

A significant share of U.S. subsistence consumers is both poor and functionally low-literate. A key question that marketers and public policy makers must ask is how vulnerable these consumers are to the persuasiveness of marketing communications. We address this question by identifying who subsistence consumers in the United States are likely to be, exploring what it means to be vulnerable, with an emphasis on cognitive vulnerability; examining two theoretical frameworks for analyzing subsistence consumer vulnerability (elaboration likelihood model and persuasion knowledge model); and offering several propositions incorporating the select cognitive constructs of self-esteem, locus of control, and powerlessness.

The main purpose of this chapter is to highlight the latest research on the implicit influence of online game advertising on children and to discuss some possible solutions to help them cope with this implicit influence.

This chapter reviews key theories and relevant empirical evidence in the literature on advertising to children in order to highlight the implicit influence of online game advertising on children.

Children can be influenced by online game advertising outside their awareness.

The chapter challenges the effectiveness of current advertising literacy education.

This chapter highlights the implicit influence of online game advertising on children. It also proposes alternative approaches to current advertising literacy education to help children cope with the implicit influence.

The current study investigates odd-even psychological pricing with the aid of a Price endings and Consumer Behavior (PCBM) Model for the hospitality industry. The PCBM proposes that a reciprocal relationship exists between hospitality marketers and consumers with reference to 00 and 99 price ending practices. Theoretical support for the posited model is provided by signaling theory, a persuasion knowledge model (PKM), and learning by analogy from marketing and psychology literatures. Results indicate that consumers use intuition and knowledge gained from interacting in the retail marketplace to respond to the intentions of hospitality marketers’ odd-even psychological pricing strategy. After repeated exposures to odd-even pricing, consumers learn to accept the 00 and 99 pricing endings as extrinsic cues for quality and value and as pricing norms of the hospitality industry.

In this chapter, we introduce a new construct we call “Perceived Deception in Online Consumer Reviews” (PDOCR). Online reviews of products are very important to companies and customers, yet they are vulnerable to unethical representations. Even regardless of whether a deceptive review has been posted or not, we take the position that it is important to understand consumers’ perceptions of deception because it is a consumer’s perception that leads him or her to experience subsequent feelings and opinions and to consider follow-up actions. We draw on the literature and build on the Elaboration Likelihood Model and Cognitive Dissonance Theory to create an overarching framework of antecedents of PDOCR, consequences, and moderators. We also report findings from a sample of in-depth interviews with real consumers about their thoughts on these phenomena and related constructs. We use our framework and theories and the qualitative data to derive Research Questions that we hope will spur future research on these important issues.