Daniel W. Baack

Strategic brand association maps: developing brand insight

Purpose – The primary purpose of this paper is to illustrate a new methodology for gaining actionable, strategic insight into a brands associations and its competitive uniqueness vis‐a‐vis key competitors.Design/methodology/approach – The authors integrate free association protocols, response latency, and more conventional scale items to develop a strategic overview of a brands associations and to depict brands strategic meaning in a comprehensive visual presentation.Findings – The authors show, via an example featuring peanut butter brands, how their methodology effectively uncovers associations that the market has for the brands and how strong, unique, relevant, and favorable those associations are.Research limitations/implications – This methodology is most appropriate for four to six brands at a time.Practical implications – The strategic brand association map process demonstrated provides managers with a very clear, consumer‐driven, strategic view of the associations their brand has, and how those...

Creativity, attention and the memory for brands: an outdoor advertising field study

This study investigates whether creativity is sufficient by itself to attract attention to the ad space or whether the ad must also be conspicuous. Attention to the ad is an important driver of message processing that leads to favourable advertising effectiveness outcomes, such as improved memory for the brand. To provide insight on this, we conducted a field study of billboard advertising along an urban expressway to explore the variables that affect recognition of outdoor advertising. Using a computational neuroscience software program, we find evidence for the presence of an attention capture threshold. That is, creativitys message processing promoting strategy only improves memory when billboards cross a threshold, i.e., when the ads are at a sufficient level of conspicuity within an individuals visual field. This threshold represents a boundary condition for creativity and provides evidence that attention must first be captured in some contexts before creativity increases the memory for brands in advertising. Results also show that billboard size, visual saliency, and brand familiarity increase recognition rates.

Attracting Foreign Direct Investment: Applying Dunning's Location Advantages Framework to FDI Advertising

Countries compete intensely for foreign direct investment (FDI) and perform a wide range of activities to attract it. Research on FDI promotion often overlooks the effects of advertising. To fill this gap in the literature, this study analyzes the content of FDI advertising to explain its structure. To guide the analysis, the authors use Dunnings FDI location advantages framework. This framework represents an effective prism through which to view FDI advertising, and Dunnings location advantages are reflected in advertising content. In an effort to shed more light on FDI advertising, the authors first provide an assessment of how advertising content varies by country income classification. Next, using exploratory factor analysis, they identify the five factors represented in FDI advertising: knowledge resources, market attractiveness, economic governance, infrastructure, and natural resources. The findings suggest that high-income countries tend to focus on knowledge resources, while lower-middle-income countries focus on economic governance. Upper-middle-income countries tap into both knowledge resources and economic governance while also promoting the attractiveness of their market.

Are multinationals localizing their web sites

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to fill a gap in the literature by examining the link between managerial attitudes regarding localization practices and firm behavior. The paper compares manager perceptions and understanding of their firms web localization practices to the actual localization on their firms web sites.Design/methodology/approach – Two phases of empirical research were completed: a survey of localization attitudes for 65 Fortune 500 managers and a content analysis of localization practices of 27 German web sites. After reviewing descriptive statistics, a series of hierarchical regressions were performed to determine if responses to the localization survey predicted localization efforts, as coded by web site content.Findings – The paper finds that multinational enterprise managers do consider localization to be important and that a managerial focus on localization, and on some of the important localization processes for web content, can lead to more localization of that content.Pract...

Improving integrated marketing communications practices: A comparison of objectives and results

Marketing managers face increasing demands for effectiveness measurement including more rigorous assessment of the match between marketing communication objectives and results. This study provides an analysis of current objective-setting practices and a comparison with past industry practices by applying a traditional communication task model to marketing communications award competition entries. The results indicate that there is still room for improvement in communication objective-setting practices. Suggestions for improving these practices include (1) making a commitment to assessment, (2) offering actionable objective-setting education, (3) increasing attention to the impact of new media, and (4) expanding the role of agencies. The authors conclude that the study of the objectives and results aspect of marketing communication management will create new opportunities for integrated marketing communications scholars and practitioners to increase the effectiveness of promotional activities.

Culturally Customizing Websites for Immigrant Communities in the United States

Recent research suggests that the customization of online marketing messages to meet the cultural preferences of immigrant communities increases preferences for those messages. Level of acculturation may be used as a segmentation variable that accounts for this effect, with lower levels of acculturation matching the preference for the home countrys culture in marketing messages. Comparisons between Asian- and Hispanic-American preferences across levels of acculturation are made, and possible convergences in preferences through acculturation are examined. The results indicate that Taiwanese-Americans have culturally-rooted preferences for web content based on their acculturation levels. Furthermore, the study shows that the web content preferences of Taiwanese- and Hispanic-American consumers converge as members of these groups acculturate.

Meaning or Sound? The Effects of Brand Name Fluency on Brand Recall and Willingness to Buy

This research argues that both meaning fluency (conceptual fluency) and sound fluency (perceptual fluency) of a brand name affect brand evaluations. Specifically, this research investigates the effects of brand name meaning and sound fluency through an application of information processing fluency theory. The results provide insight into previously unexplained findings in the brand management literature. Two experiments demonstrate that perceptually more fluent brand names lead to higher brand recall, for perceptually less fluent brands names, high conceptual fluency leads to higher brand recall and in cases of low consumer involvement, high perceptual fluency leads to higher willingness to buy.