Amitava Chattopadhyay

Humour in Advertising: The Moderating Role of Prior Brand Evaluation

A consumers prior evaluation of an advertised brand is hypothesized to moderate the effectiveness of humor in advertising. Further, cognitive responses are hypothesized as mediators of the impact of humorous ads on brand attitude. The results support the hypothesized moderator role of prior brand evaluation: when prior evaluation of the advertised brand is positive, a humorous ad is more effective than its nonhumorous counterpart in changing consumer attitudes and choice behavior. When consumers have a negative prior attitude, the opposite is true: a humorous ad is less effective in changing consumer attitudes and choice behavior than its nonhumorous counterpart. The results also support the conceptualization of cognitive responses as mediators of the impact of humorous advertisements on brand attitude.

Rethinking Marketing Programs for Emerging Markets

We point to a fundamental inconsistency in the emerging market strategies of multinational firms. On the one hand, they seek billions of new consumers in the emerging markets of China, India, Indonesia, and Latin America; on the other, their marketing programs are scarcely adapted for these markets. The result is low market penetration, low market shares, and poor profitability. These multinationals are trapped by their own devices in gilded cages, serving the affluent few and ignoring the potential of billions of new consumers that attracted them in the first place. In this paper, we propose that, in order to attract billions of new consumers, the marketing programs of multinationals need to be rethought from the ground up. We identify three key factors that characterize emerging markets: (1) low incomes, (2) variability in consumers and infrastructure, and (3) the relative cheapness of labor, which is often substituted for capital. We draw on numerous case studies from around the world to illustrate how to incorporate these realities into marketing programs. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of such an approach for the multinationals core strategic assumptions.

Consumer Control and Empowerment: A Primer

This paper introduces consumer empowerment as a promising research area. Going beyond lay wisdom that more control is always better, we outline several hypotheses concerning (a) the factors that influence the perception of empowerment, and (b) the consequences of greater control and the subjective experience of empowerment on consumer satisfaction and confidence.

The Situational Importance of Recall and Inference in Consumer Decision Making

An experiment, which examines the relationship between cognition and attitude toward a product as a function of time and the presence of information about a competing product, is described. A scheme, which partitions cognitive responses into categories on the basis of their relative abstractness and, therefore, memorability, is proposed. Results show that the proposed scheme accounts for a significant amount of attitude variance and outperforms the traditional cognitive response scheme, especially after a delay. Results also show that, contrary to recent theory and research regarding the lack of correlation between attitude and recall, recall can be a predictor of attitude given the proper context and a theoretically justifiable recall measure.

The use of visual mental imagery in new product design

In this research, the authors seek to advance the understanding of how marketing can facilitate the new product design process. They focus on how designers’ use of a specific cognitive process, vis...

Facilitating and Rewarding Creativity During New Product Development

In an effort to improve creativity in the new product development process, many firms offer incentive programs, creativity training programs, or both. However, creativity continues to be a construct that is not well understood in marketing, and little research has examined the joint influence of such initiatives on creative outcomes. As a result, there is considerable variance in the way firms approach these issues. A qualitative study of 20 firms indicates that 15 offered some type of incentive program, whereas only 7 engaged in creativity training (a subset of the firms used both). Given that previous research has consistently found that extrinsic rewards offered in isolation actually undermine the creative process (by reducing intrinsic motivation), it seems that many firms may be unwittingly hampering their own creative efforts. However, two experiments demonstrate that the effect of rewards can be made positive if offered in conjunction with appropriate training. Specifically, product creativity was highest when the monetary reward was paired with a dedicated creative training technique. The training alters the influence of the reward such that it reinforces, rather than undermines, intrinsic motivation. Managers can improve the effectiveness of their creative efforts by leveraging the use of incentives and training in combination.

On the Perceived Value of Money: The Reference Dependence of Currency Numerosity Effects

Money illusion research shows that the nominal (face) value of money affects consumer perceptions of its real value. Recent mixed findings on consumer valuations in different currencies suggest that the underlying anchoring and adjustment processes are complex. We develop a framework to identify boundary conditions that specify the direction of anchoring effects on valuations in different currencies. Consumers anchor on the numerosity of the nominal difference between prices and salient referents (e.g., budgets) when evaluating transactions. Support for our framework comes from a series of experiments that evoke different reference standards. We discuss implications and opportunities for future research.

Does Attitude toward the Ad Endure? The Moderating Effects of Attention and Delay

Do the effects of attitude toward the ad on consumer decisions endure beyond the scenarios that characterize previous research? In examining this question, the authors focus on the persistence of ad-attitude effects as a function of the level of attention at encoding and the delay between ad exposure and response. The results of an experiment designed to test their hypotheses suggest that ad-attitude effects do not persist in a number of instances. Over time, as memory for an ad fades, its effects on ad attitude dissipate. As a result, the ad-attitude effects on brand attitude that are reported in past research disappear after a delay. In fact, in certain situations likable ads are shown to have a detrimental impact on brand attitude. For instance, when it receives little attention, a highly affective ad (compared with a more neutral ad) may focus attention away from the brand claims and lead to a lower brand attitude after a delay. Copyright 1992 by the University of Chicago.

Managing Brand Experience: The Market Contact Audit™

ABSTRACT Although 90 percent of marketing communication investments are accounted for by investments in brand contacts, i.e., the points at which the consumer and the brand come in contact with each other, until now, there has not been a tool that allows managers to identify, a priori and from a consumer perspective, the most effective set of contacts in which to invest. We describe a tool that we have developed that empowers the brand owners/marketers to (1) identify and select the critical contacts that are relevant for a particular brand, (2) integrate across these key contact points, and (3) deliver brand experience through a relevant and pertinent set of consumer brand encounters at a minimum cost, but with maximal impact. We then discuss how the metrics derived from this tool can be used to inform a variety of important decisions in the context of managing brand contacts. We close with a discussion of some of the regularities that we have uncovered from the over 150 brands that we have audited across numerous markets and categories.

The Importance and Functional Significance of Affective Cues in Consumer Choice

Existing evidence for affects influence on information processing and choice under high elaboration is mixed. In addition, affective choice is often viewed as erroneous in that it is assumed to lead to regret. We show that affect has a reliable impact on choice under high elaboration, which occurs through a combination of heuristic and systematic processing. Furthermore, consumers were able to correct for the impact irrelevant affect had on systematic processing but not for its impact on less conscious heuristic processing. Finally, affective purchases led to greater long-term satisfaction for important purchases, suggesting that affective choice can be functional. (c) 2006 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..