Andrew A. Mitchell

The Effect of Verbal and Visual Components of Advertisements on Brand Attitudes and Attitude Toward the Advertisement

This article presents the results of a study designed to obtain a better understanding of the effects of using valenced visual information in advertising. In the study, subjects saw advertisements for hypothetical products that contained affect-laden photographs with different valences (Picture Type Manipulation). The results indicate that the affect-laden photographs had an effect on both attitude toward the advertisement ( A ad ) and brand attitudes; however, no differences were found in the product attribute beliefs that were formed. Photographs that were evaluated positively created more favorable attitudes toward the advertisements and brand attitudes, whereas the reverse was true for photographs that were evaluated negatively. The results of an analysis of covariance indicate that the inclusion of both the predicted attitude from structured scales (ΣΣ b i , e i ) and elicited beliefs did not eliminate all the reliable Picture Type effects on brand attitudes; however, the inclusion of A ad did eliminate these effects. In addition, A ad was found to affect brand attitudes for advertisements that contain only copy, and evidence is presented that A ad and brand attitudes are separate hypothetical constructs. Finally, a Dual Component model is presented to explain the effects of visual and verbal information in advertisements.

The Assessment of Alternative Measures of Consumer Expertise

This study assesses a number of different measures of consumer expertise by examining their ability to predict correct choices in three stimulus-based choice tasks and to support a number of hypotheses derived from the cognitive psychology and consumer behavior literature. The hypotheses concern how consumer expertise should affect the content and organization of knowledge for a product class and reasons for choice across different usage contexts. After a factor analysis of the different measures of consumer expertise that yielded three orthogonal factors, we used regression and TOBIT analyses to examine the effect of each factor on the number of correct choices and the hypothesized differences in the content and organization of knowledge and reasons for choice in the choice tasks. Two of the factors, “subjective/objective knowledge” and “friends owning motorcycles,” predict the number of correct choices in the stimulus-based choice tasks, while the subjective/objective-knowledge factor supports almost all of the hypothesized relationships for the content and organization of knowledge and reasons for choice. The third factor, “magazines read/motorcycles owned,” also supports many of the relationships concerning general knowledge.

The Effect of Advertising on Attitude Accessibility, Attitude Confidence, and the Attitude-Behavior Relationship

The influence of advertising repetition on several non-evaluative dimensions of attitudes and the strength of the relationship between attitudes and behavior are examined. The results indicate that attitudes formed on the basis of repeated ad exposure are similar to those formed on the basis of direct experience in that they are more accessible from memory, held with more confidence, and are more predictive of subsequent behavior than are attitudes based on a single ad exposure. The results are consistent with the propositions that attitude accessibility and attitude confidence moderate the attitude-behavior relationship. Copyright 1989 by the University of Chicago.

The Moderating Effect of Product Knowledge on the Learning and Organization of Product Information

This research examines how differences in the organization of brand information in memory between higher and lower knowledge consumers affects which brands are retrieved when consumers are provided with a usage situation. A spreading activation network model of memory is used to predict the results of an experiment where the usage situations were varied at encoding and repeated recall sessions. The results of the study indicate that lower knowledge consumers tend to learn only the brand information that is appropriate for a usage situation at encoding and do not organize brands by subcategory in memory. Consequently, lower knowledge consumers tend to retrieve the same set of brands regardless of the usage situation at retrieval. Alternatively, higher knowledge consumers learn brand information appropriate for different usage situations and organize this information by product subcategories. This allows higher knowledge consumers to retrieve the brands appropriate for the usage situation at retrieval, and to vary the set of retrieved brands as the usage situation changes. Copyright 2003 by the University of Chicago.

Low Involvement Strategies for Processing Advertisements

Abstract Involvement is conceptualized as a state variable with two components, intensity and direction. Intensity is associated with the amount of attention devoted to an ad and direction is represented by the type of strategy used to process the information. An experiment contrasts two strategies, one with brand evaluation as its goal (high involvement) and one that inhibits brand evaluation (low involvement). The low involvement (nonbrand) strategy yielded inferior memory for brand information but a more positive attitude toward the brand.

The use of alternative knowledge-acquisition procedures in the development of a knowledge-based media planning system

The knowledge-acquisition procedures used in developing a knowledge-based media planning system are discussed. The approach used in developing the system and the resulting system will have a number of unique characteristics. First, in developing the system, we first constructed a system which we call a decision frame. This system structures the problem for the media planner and contains little expertise. We are currently adding expertise to the system so that our final system will be able to operate both as a decision frame and as an expert system. A number of different knowledge-acquisition procedures are currently being used to obtain the requisite knowledge from media planners. These include: (1), elicitation procedures; (2), problem-sorting techniques; (3), protocol analysis; and (4), having experts use the decision frame system to acquire knowledge and to determine the validity of the system.