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Presents a communications relationship model for setting promotional goals. The model divides promotional objectives into short, mid‐ and long‐range goals and helps present advertising and related promotional tools as an ongoing process. Its focus is primarily on how advertising and related communications engineer situations and the importance of gearing advertisements that maximize subsequent advertisements′ effectiveness. The model has multiple uses and can be used by different advertising stakeholders such as advertising designers, sellers and managers, as well as end users.

Although there is an extensive literature on the child's understanding of the intent behind advertising, children's understanding of the promotional nature of advertising and marketing has been neglected. Promotional is defined as making positive claims about the product. Children aged from 4 to 9 years of age were presented with television commercials with different endings and asked which ending should be used when the ad is shown on TV. Results show that 4–5‐year‐olds chose the fun option that shows the product in a bad light but by 5–6 years of age children are rejecting this option in favour of the promotional ending and by 7–8 years less than 10% chose the fun option. These findings should inform the debate about regulating advertising to children as such regulation is based on children being able to distinguish advertising from programming.

Using a classification of benefits and costs of promotional offers along three routes – economic, informational and affective – this paper aims at evaluating, from the consumer's point of view, the relative perceptual disadvantages of separate‐item bundles compared to pre‐wrapped bundles.

The marketing literature and a qualitative study based on 18 consumers permits the identification of the relative perceived costs and benefits associated with separate‐item bundles and for hypotheses to be derived. An experiment on a sample of 120 adult consumers was then set up to test these hypotheses.

The findings suggest that consumers associate separate‐item bundles with higher economic benefit but also with higher inspection costs. From a more global perspective, there is no loss of interest in separate‐item bundles compared to pre‐wrapped bundles.

Focusing the research on separate‐item bundles clarifies the way consumers evaluate promotions. Its qualitative phase gives support to the relevance of an “informational route”, beyond the traditional utilitarian and hedonic routes. Its quantitative phase confirms the importance of cognitive biases in consumers' perceptions of promotions.

The numerous advantages of separate‐item bundles for manufacturers and retailers and their attraction to consumers should lead to an increasingly intensive use in promotional campaigns. Besides, the quality of in‐store communication is the most important factor of the success of separate‐item bundles, which provides the opportunity to propose meaningful recommendations for practitioners.

If the strengths and weaknesses of separate‐item bundles have already been studied from a managerial point of view, to the authors' knowledge, no research has focused on separate‐item bundle efficiency from the consumer's point of view.

This study examines how Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) events are marketed in order to understand the role of violence in promoting events. Researchers examined 134 pieces of promotional artwork and 57 promotional news releases by MMA organisations across North America, Asia and Europe and found that 18 (13.4%) pieces of promotional artwork used violent text or imagery. Violent text was found in 12 (21%) of the 57 news releases. Violence was typically limited to smaller or European organisations. Results illustrate an evolution of the sport, suggesting violence may no longer be necessary to promote events.

Drawing on the elaboration likelihood model, this study aims to examine how employee volunteer program (EVP) type, corporate visual identity, and issue involvement affect external publics' attributions of EVPs and attitudes toward the company.

A 2 (EVP type: skills-based vs. not-skills-based) × 2 (salience of corporate visual identity: high vs. low) randomized experiment was conducted with 157 participants from Amazon's Mechanical Turk. A fictitious company and its EVP messages were created to control for the company's existing reputation and participants' past experiences with the company.

Participants responded positively toward EVP messages regardless of the EVP type. However, salient corporate visual identity significantly aroused participants' more attributed firm-serving motives, which led to more negative attitudes toward the company. Next, issue involvement presented its value in EVP communication as highly involved participants displayed favorable attributions of EVPs and positive attitudes toward the company.

This study approaches EVPs as an important CSR practice and expands the discussion on strategic CSR communication by uncovering the roles of central and peripheral cues in public responses to EVP messages. Moreover, the findings highlight the importance of fostering and enhancing publics' issue involvement in achieving successful EVP communication.

This study investigated the application in the field of healthcare of a recently developed model of information seeking and communication. The purpose of this paper is to test the model’s validity and to identify insights that it may provide.

To investigate the model’s application to information users, the findings from published literature on physicians’ information behaviour were studied. To investigate its application to information providers, interviews were carried out with staff working for the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence and with employees of pharmaceutical companies. The findings were examined using deductive content analysis.

The findings endorse the validity of the model, with minor modifications. The model provides practical insights into the behaviour of both users and providers of information and the factors that influence them. It can be used to identify ways in which information behaviour may be positively modified in both finding and communicating healthcare information.

This research demonstrates the practical value of a new model of information behaviour which was developed using insights from earlier models. In doing so it answers criticisms that research in library and information science often fails to build on previous research and that it has little practical usefulness.

Online influencers are increasingly used by brands around the globe to establish brand communication. This study aims to investigate the characteristics of social media content in terms of presentation style and brand communication among online influencers in China. The authors identified how characteristics of social media posts influence young consumers’ engagement with the posts.

The authors analyzed 1,779 posts from the Sina Weibo accounts of ten top-ranked online influencers by combining traditional content analysis with Web data crawling of audience engagement with social media posts.

Online influencers in China more frequently used photos than videos to communicate with their social media audience. Altogether 8% and 6% of posts carried information about promotion and event, respectively. Posts with promotional incentives as well as event information were more likely to engage audiences. Altogether 22% of the sampled social media posts mentioned brands. Posts with brand information, however, were less likely to engage audiences. Furthermore, having long text is more effective than photos/images in generating likes from social media audiences.

Combining content analysis of social media posts and engagement analytics obtained via Web data crawling, this study is, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, one of the first empirical studies to analyze influencer marketing and young consumers’ reactions to social media in China.

Word‐of‐mouth communication (WOM) is a dominant force in the marketplace for services. However, the current body of research provides little insight into the nature of WOM in the service marketplace. Reports the results of a content‐analytic study that provides insight into WOM’s content and the catalysts by which it is stimulated. The goal was to capture a series of “grounded events” from which broader patterns could be discerned. These grounded events were actual incidents of WOM as described by the recipients of a communication. Three content categories and ten catalyst categories are identified. Implications for managers are addressed.

This paper aims to investigate how pharmacies communicate their customer value proposition (CVP) in a complex and multiple-stakeholder setting. More specifically, from the pharmacists’ perspective, the study analyzes how CVP is articulated in complex settings/offerings and among multiple stakeholders; and elucidates the communication gap among stakeholders of the CVP.

Two studies were conducted to examine how offerings are communicated throughout the value chain. Through six in-depth interviews, Study 1 aimed to analyze how pharmacies articulate CVP for over-the-counter (OTC) drugs in a complex business-to-business-to-consumer setting. For Study 2, the data were collected from 113 French pharmacists to investigate the communication issues and to unveil the tools used to promote OTC drugs among the different stakeholders.

From the pharmacists’ perspective, the longer the chain, the more complex the efficiency of the CVP. This study conceives a new and adapted CVP as iterative and cumulative. This paper also highlights how value is distributed across the customer relationship in a complex and regulated industry. The findings feature a reciprocal perspective of CVP between the pharmaceutical labs and their direct/indirect customers. Final customers aim at creating a reciprocal approach with the different stakeholders. Pharmacists use a unidirectional perspective of CVP with their direct customers (patients/final customers).

The study contributes to a better understanding of the CVP in complex industries characterized by a chain of value distributed among multiple stakeholders (i.e. business-to-consumer and business-to-business). The article also enriches past research that analyzed the way firms communicate their offerings from a CVP perspective.

The quality and reliability of medical communication for branded drug adoption is extremely critical, not only for safeguarding patient interests but also for ensuring successful investments by multinational pharmaceutical firms. This paper predicts doctors’ prescribing intentions based on communication relationship among factors for late entrant branded drugs, compared with pioneering brand choice, for treating chronic diseases such as hypertension.

The constructs were validated with structural equation model for a sample set of 151 doctors from private hospitals in the National Capital Region of India.

This research reveals communication drivers and draws on theory to suggest that the doctor’s behavioural prescription intentions, subject to social influence from their colleagues, leads to lower adoption responses.

Given that limitations on sample size are often unavoidable, this study reveals that, due to the availability of substituting brands, alternate therapeutic routes and lack of availability of a practical guide for prescription, a communication model needs to be developed and validated.

Furthermore, managers of pharmaceutical firms should differentiate between the effects of direct and indirect communication–integration efforts for minimizing uncertainty in drug adoption in the context of the fragmented and unpredictable Indian market.

A late entrant may lose its dominant market share to alternate brands from other suppliers due to communication gaps in an unstructured market, leading to low adoption intentions. The study provides business theorists, drug marketers and health-care professionals with unique insights into specific communication drivers of prescribing decisions, aimed at ensuring reliable and appropriate drug adoption in Indian markets.