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Disclosure—informing advice recipients of the potential bias of an advisor—is a popular tool to manage conflicts of interest. However, conflict of interest disclosures usually compete with a host of other information that is important, relevant or interesting to the advisee. Across one field study and five experiments, we examine the effect of conflict of interest disclosures in a realistic and context-rich setting (online blogs) in which the disclosure is short, clear and conspicuous (as desired by many regulatory bodies) but embedded in the context of other competing information. Our findings show that, in contrast to much of the prior research on conflict of interest disclosures, recipients who read a blog post containing a conflict of interest disclosure report increased trust in the blogger and evaluate the blogger, the blogger’s recommendation, and the sponsoring organization more favorably than recipients who read a post with no disclosure. The effect is driven by disclosure acting as a heuristic cue to infer greater trust in the blogger’s expertise and consequently greater persuasion. The inference of greater expertise and its effect on persuasion are mitigated when recipients deliberate on the disclosure. We discuss implications of these findings for organizations, advisors, consumers and policy makers.

The case traces the development of the Under Armour (UA) brand, product, and market growth under CEO and founder Kevin Plank from its inception in 1996 through 2016. UA provides a cohesive case study of how to launch and sustain a consumer brand even in the face of its third-party manufacturing approach, which gives its apparel no patentable design or fabric technologies. The case uses UA's brand and advertising development as a backdrop for the current pivotal issue of how to target women to sustain growth. UA's stated goal is to build a $1.9 billion women's business by 2019. In laying out UA's growth and competitive moves, the case lets students analyze broadcast, social media, and other digital advertising campaigns in view of the company's brand development and strategic targeting. The case also highlights the importance of leveraging brand heritage and historical differentiation while respecting key nuances when extending into new markets (i.e., moving from a predominantly male-driven audience to female). It also allows an exploration of how to use consumer insight and broader cultural attitudes and trends to support extending a position into new markets.

Companies increasingly involve consumers in the process of developing advertising and other marketing actions. An important question that has not been explored is whether brands benefit from communicating to consumers who had not been involved in the co-creation process that a target ad was developed by a fellow consumer. The authors propose a skepticism–identification model of ad creator influence, which hypothesizes that disclosing to an audience that an ad was created by a consumer triggers two opposing effects: skepticism about the competence of the ad creator and identification with the ad creator. Four studies demonstrate that the effectiveness of disclosing advertising co-creation depends on factors that hinder skepticism and heighten identification with the ad creator. Specifically, attributing the ad to a consumer is shown to increase persuasion when the audience (1) has limited cognitive resources to scrutinize the message, (2) is given background information about the ad creator that enhances source similarity, and (3) has high loyalty toward the brand. The implications of these findings on marketing theory and practice are discussed.

Disclosure–informing advice recipients of the potential bias of an advisor–is frequently used to remedy the effects of conflicts of interest. However, conflict-of-interest disclosures usually compe...

Two studies examine the impact of adding parity features to an advertising message that compares a dominant target brand to a competitor. We document that in some instances the presence of parity features prompts more favorable target evaluations (enhancement), whereas in others it results in more negative evaluations of the target (dilution). We predict when each of these outcomes will occur on the basis of a fit between an individual's regulatory goal focus and the means of goal pursuit depicted in the message presentation. Enhancement occurs when there is a fit between an individual's regulatory goal and how message information is presented, and dilution occurs when there is nonfit.

Although several advertising studies report that message repetition leads to favorable evaluation of the advertised brand, a surprisingly large number of studies fail to find this repetition effect. This article investigates the influence of the advertising context in which the ad is presented on the repetition effect. The ad context, along with the ad content and individual differences in expertise, are found to influence the type of elaboration (item-specific and relational elaboration) a message receives. Message repetition affects evaluation when the additional exposures facilitate the complementary generation of these two types of elaboration of the ad message. When either type of elaboration dominates or when the message recipient spontaneously generates the impoverished type of elaboration, the effect of ad repetition is not observed. These findings provide evidence for the distinct influence on evaluation of the amount and type of elaboration that an advertising message receives.

We hypothesize that the accessibility of task-relevant knowledge determines whether judgments reflect the substance of the information that is brought to mind or the ease of generating and retrieving such information. Our findings indicate that when relevant knowledge is highly accessible or not at all accessible, judgments are based on the content of the information considered. Between these extremes in knowledge accessibility, judgments are based on the perceived ease with which information can be retrieved. This perceived ease is a function of both the number of reasons requested and the wording of the retrieval request.

The persuasive impact of a negation (“not difficult to use”) is shown to depend on the allocation of cognitive resources. When resources are substantial, a brand is evaluated more favorably when a negation is positively valenced (“not difficult to use”) than when it is negatively valenced (“not easy to use”). Under limited resources, a negation has no effect. Between these extremes in resource allocation, the brand is evaluated more favorably when the negation is negatively valenced than when it is positively valenced. Further, this outcome under moderate resources occurs even though respondents represent the negation accurately in memory. These findings provide evidence that the processing of a negation follows a specific sequence such that the affirmation (“difficult to use”) is elaborated first, and then the negator tag (“not”) is incorporated in judgment.

The “attraction effect” occurs when preference fora target product increases relative to a competitor when a choice option that is dominated by the target brand, but not by the competitor brand, is included in the choice set. The present article offers an explanation for this outcome in terms of two principles of consumer information processing: data deficiency and cognitive resource deficiency. Specifically, results from a lab experiment with 234 student respondents show that when product information is relatively “meaningless” and thus, data deficient, making respondents allocate greater cognitive resources to the decision task by asking them to justify their decision, increases the attraction effect. However, when the product information is quite “meaningful” and thus, not data deficient, increasing resource allocation by instructing respondents to justify choice, decreases the attraction effect. We propose that when the stimulus is less meaningful, the additional processing effort that justification i...

Consumers can face two types of judgment and choice situations: They may be considering products that are classified in a single product category, or products that may belong to several different product categories. This article compares these within- and across-category judgments on the basis of the distinction between taxonomic and goal-derived categorization. The first study examines how products that belong to taxonomic and goal-derived categories are represented in memory. The findings support the view that taxonomic categories differ from goal-derived categories in terms of the ease with which the features shared between members of the category are accessible and the type of features that are used to represent the members. In turn, these differences influence consumer beliefs, judgments, and choice sets when consumers make within- and across-category product comparisons. A second study examines how consumers' familiarity with consumption situations influences the construction of choice sets. Results indicate that as familiarity with consumption situations increases, consumers construct more narrowly defined, within-category choice sets, whereas in less-familiar situations consumers construct broader, across-category choice sets. The implication of these findings on marketing action is discussed. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

In this article, the authors propose an integrative model of advertising persuasion that orders the major theories and empirically supported generalizations about persuasion that have been offered in the information-processing literature. The authors begin by reviewing this literature, placing particular emphasis on the assorted processes or mechanisms that have been suggested to mediate persuasion. To consolidate this material, the authors propose a framework that delineates three alternative strategies that people may use to process persuasive communications and form judgments, in which each strategy represents a different level of cognitive resources that is employed during message processing. In addition, the framework identifies a judgment correction stage that allows people to attempt to correct their initial judgments for biases that they perceive may have affected such judgments. The authors add to this by identifying particular processes that appear to mediate when and how these judgment formation and judgment correction processes operate. They also attempt to foster growth by specifying some of the critical issues and gaps in the knowledge that appear to impede further progress. Finally, the authors clarify how the proposed framework can inform the decisions advertising practitioners make about advertising execution and media factors.

This paper explores the moderating effect of product category knowledge and attribute importance on the attraction effect. The results of our study point to several boundary conditions of the effect. For consumers who have a moderate level of product category knowledge, and for consumers who assign more importance to one product attribute over the other, the attraction effect was strongest. In contrast, the attraction effect was diminished, in some cases to insignificant levels, for consumers with a high or low level of product category knowledge, and for consumers who consider both product attributes about equally important.

Research on regulatory focus has established a regulatory matching effect: The persuasiveness of a message is enhanced when regulatory orientations of message and perceiver match (i.e., both are promotion or both are prevention). We report evidence that varying the hedonic outcome reverses this effect. We manipulated hedonic outcome by explicitly stating pleasurable versus painful outcomes as part of the message frame as well as by priming perceivers to focus on either pleasurable or painful outcomes. When both message and perceiver were focused on pleasurable outcomes, we replicated the regulatory matching effect. However, the matching effect reversed when the hedonic outcome of the message was opposed to that of the perceiver (i.e., one was pleasurable and the other painful). Under these conditions, messages that mismatched the perceivers' regulatory orientation were more persuasive (i.e., promotion message for a prevention oriented perceiver or vice versa). We also examined the persuasion effects when both message and perceiver were focused on painful outcomes and found that the regulatory matching effect re-emerged. The reversal of the regulatory matching effect by hedonic outcome strongly suggests that hedonic motives (approach of pleasure vs. avoidance of pain) and regulatory focus motives are distinct constructs. This is important because contrary to theoretical statements these constructs have often been confounded.

Although the persuasive impact of repeated message exposures has been investigated extensively, the effect of varying the spacing of those repetitions on message judgments has not been examined empirically. We use recent theorizing, which suggests that in relation to massed presentations, spaced presentations of a target ad are likely to prompt the allocation of more resources to stimulus processing because spaced exposures are perceived as less familiar. Brand judgments are expected to depend on the resources that are allocated to message processing in relation to those required for this task, and these judgments are expected to be most favorable when the resources allocated to message processing match those required for the task. Our data are consistent with these expectations.

The authors examine the effect of type of elaboration on information processing and product judgments. Research participants were shown print advertisements promoting a camera in which the pictorial material depicted either product features mentioned in the copy (attribute-focused condition) or people, objects, or usage occasions captured by the camera (image-focused condition). These advertisements were presented in the context of advertisements for competing brands of cameras or for products in categories unrelated to cameras. When the context was composed of competing cameras, the attribute-focused advertisement resulted in more favorable target camera judgments than did the image-focused advertisement, whereas when products unrelated to cameras served as the context, the image-focused advertisement prompted more favorable judgments. These results are interpreted as evidence that product judgments are more favorable when an advertising message receives two types of elaboration, item-specific and relational, than when only one of these types of elaboration is dominant.

It is increasingly common for firms to organize contests where consumers are invited to create ads that promote a particular brand. An important consideration in firms’ use of such consumers-generated ads is the expectation that consumers would trust messages created by a fellow consumer and hence be more readily persuaded by them. We test this assumption and examine whether disclosing that an ad was created by a consumer affects its persuasiveness. Our findings show that, counter-intuitively, awareness that an ad is consumer-generated increase skepticism towards the source, and decrease ad and brand evaluations. However, this effect can reversed by factors that increase consumers’ identification with the ad creator. We discuss implications of our research with respect to soliciting consumer input and future research on consumer-generated advertising.