Bidisha Burman

The Impact of Price Level and Appeal Type in Hotel Advertising: A Pilot Study

ABSTRACT Limited extant experimental research on advertising appeal effectiveness in the presence of price cues in a service offer provides the motivation for this study. While past research has found support for the effectiveness of both rational and emotional appeals in services marketing, this research, in the context of hotel advertising, shows that appeal type effectiveness may vary with the price level of the service. More specifically, this study finds that rational appeals are more effective than emotional appeals for low-priced hotels, but for high-priced hotels, rational and emotional appeals show no significant difference in influencing consumer evaluations of the offer.

Don’t Waste Your Emotions: The Impact of Price and Advertising Appeals in Services

Promoting services through advertising is different and more challenging compared to product advertising, as services possess intangible qualities (Stafford and Day 1995). Research has recognized that services require different advertising strategies than those of products (Cutler and Javalgi 1993). Assuring customers of service quality before the service experience make tangible cues important in services marketing. Even though tangible cues have been shown to be particularly important for services advertising as it can help the pre-purchase assessment of the service through the psychical representation of the attributes in the servicescape (Legg and Baker 1987; Reimer and Kuehn 2005), researchers have found that emotional appeals may result in more positive reactions from advertisements (Goldberg and Gorn 1987). Emotional appeals are thought to be more important in services compared to goods advertising since the consumption experience cannot be easily evaluated pre-purchase (Zeithaml et al. 1985). Therefore, services advertising often rely on the intangible cues found in emotional appeals.

Effects of Unpacking in Spending Predictions: The Role of Typicality (An Extended Abstract)

Although there is a wealth of psychological research on how people predict the probability of outcomes and the duration of tasks, there is little on how they predict spending (see Peetz and Buehler 2009). This is unfortunate because spending predictions underlie many decisions, from whether to have kids to where to go for lunch. Our objective is to understand spending predictions by extending theory and research from other domains of judgment. In particular, we focus on unpacking effects. We ask whether unpacking a complex or multifaceted spending category (e.g., “monthly spending on groceries”) by listing one of its elements and a residual category (e.g., “monthly spending on meat and other groceries”) influences predictions. On normative grounds it should not (the referent of judgment remains fixed), but psychological research on other judgment domains suggests that it will.