How do consumers relate to advertising?

by James H. Leigh Associate Professor of Marketing

A longstanding interest in understanding the extent to which advertising elements affect consumers and in identifying how best to capture their effects has led me into exciting territory. Most of my research involves efforts that build on my doctoral training in consumer psychology and research methodology. Advertising just happens to be an application area uniquely suited for carrying out such pursuits. I will share with you two of these projects and point out the strong implications for the practice of advertising.

The first project is an award-winning research study conducted by George Zinkhan (University of Georgia), Vanitha Swaminathan (University of Pittsburg) and myself. Advertisers commonly use either recall or recognition measures to assess the remembrance of advertisements that have been aired. Of particular interest here is whether recall and recognition are unidimensional or multidimensional, taking into account the antecedent factors of ad characteristics and subjective reactions.

The study identified two dimensions of ad-based antecedents, labeled cognitive and affective aspects, and two memory dimensions, labeled recall and recognition. Recall is influenced by cognitive (mental), and to a lesser extent, by affective (emotional) factors, whereas recognition is primarily influenced by affective factors. This research provides strong support for the potential use of stimulus-related factors in conjunction with, or as surrogates of, memory-based measures of effectiveness.

The second project is conducted by Mindy Ji Song (a Mays 2002 PhD graduate, now at Iowa State University), Peter Dacin (Queens University) and myself. Advertisers often attempt to associate such human traits as being successful or intelligent with their brand. We posit that the impact of this use will depend in part on the nature of the trait and on the degree to which the consumer is concerned with their social visibility.

Thus far we have conducted three experiments to examine these issues. We have found that when social visibility is high, an appealing trait-related word makes the concern more salient. In the case of a less-appealing trait, a key finding is that individuals’ attitudes toward a brand become more salient. Additional experiments are currently underway, but our preliminary results lead us to conclude that the benefit of building brand personality depends on the social concern of the consumer.

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