David W. Stewart

From Consumer Response to Active Consumer: Measuring the Effectiveness of Interactive Media

Traditional measures of the effectiveness of marketing communications suggest a specific process by which marketing actions influence consumers. This article offers a broader philosophical perspective on measuring the effectiveness of marketing communications that focuses on interaction as the unit of analysis, rather than the behavior of either the marketer or the consumer. Structuration theory is discussed and offered as a viable foundation for the identification, selection, and evaluation of new measures of effectiveness in an interactive context among active, goal-driven consumers and marketers. Structuration theory focuses on the emergency and evolution of the structure of interaction, which is posited as a critical factor in devising, selecting, and evaluating new measures of the effectiveness of marketing communications. This view broadens the potential set of measures of effectiveness of interactive marketing communications, implying alternative meanings for measures under different interaction structures and combinations of goal states.

Measuring the Effects and Effectiveness of Interactive Advertising: A Research Agenda

ABSTRACT Although interactive advertising is not new, its scale, scope and immediacy has increased substantially with the diffusion of new technologies such as the Internet. The growth of interactive advertising highlights the role of the consumer in the determining the effects and effectiveness of advertising, while challenging traditional assumptions about how advertising works. The active role of the consumer in determining the effects of advertising has important implications for how the effects and effectiveness of advertising are measured and how various measures are interpreted. The present paper offers a discussion of these issues and compares and contrasts traditional notions regarding the measurement of advertising effects with notions that recognize the active role of the consumer in interacting with advertising and the advertiser. Implications for future research are discussed.

Executional Factors and Advertising Effectiveness: A Replication

Abstract This article reports a replication of the Stewart and Furse (1986) study of the influence of executional factors on advertising performance. Using a new set of 1,017 commercials, coded for content, the replication finds the original results reported by Stewart and Furse are highly robust. The use of a brand-differentiating message and a strong product focus continue to manifest a positive impact on measures of recall, comprehension, and persuasion.

Market-back approach to the design of integrated communications programs: A change in paradigm and a focus on determinants of success

Abstract Although widely used in practice, integrated marketing communications (IMC) remains poorly defined and has met with mixed success. The present article reviews various definitions of IMC and suggests that each of these definitions is consistent with a more general paradigmatic view of integrated communications. Four misleading assumptions implicit in the development of IMC programs that may reduce the effectiveness of such programs are identified. Use of a “market back” process for the design of coordinated marketing programs as a means for increasing the probability of the success of IMC programs is suggested. This approach and the assumptions implicit in IMC suggest the need for a very different approach to the management of marketing communications.

Branding Strategies, Marketing Communication, and Perceived Brand Meaning: The Transfer of Purposive, Goal–Oriented Brand Meaning to Brand Extensions

This article develops and tests a conceptual model of the transfer process whereby perceived similarity organized around shared goals facilitates the transfer of knowledge and affect from a parent brand to an extension of that brand. Empirical results, based on two well-known brands and two hypothetical product extensions for each brand, demonstrate that the availability of well-formed, goal-derived categories associated with a parent brand establishes an organizing framework for consumers assessments of similarity thatfacilitates the transfer of consumer knowledge and attitude from the parent brand to a brand extension in another product category. This facilitating effect of similarity does not occur in the absence of goal-derived categories. The results also reveal how marketing communication can be used to facilitate the transfer process by framing similarity in terms of common goals. Implications are discussed for the organization of consumer knowledge and affect across product categories and for understanding prior research findings on brand extension.

Consumer behavior and the practice of marketing

most enthusiastically received courses in a marketing curriculum. It probes the nature of intricate and sometimes mysterious forces underlying human thought and activity, and relates those forces to the excitement of a dynamically competitive marketplace. In drawing that relationship, it deals with the desires, attitudes, images, fantasies, dreams and hopes of hundreds of millions of people. But do most texts on the subject come anywhere near fulfillment of this seemingly bright potential? The author feels that at least some do not, because they tend to turn a real world subject into something abstract and dull. In his book, Runyon sets out to correct this by interrelating practice and theory, to demonstrate how the former is dependent upon the latter. Does he succeed? Perhaps not as well as he promises, but perhaps better than many-or even most-of the other authors who have written texts in this field. Each chapter begins with three or four short illustrations relating concepts to be covered in the chapter to marketing practice. Most of the illustrations draw upon brief examples of advertising programs. They do a good job of demonstrating that s ch general concepts of the behavioral sciences as social class, personality and attitudes are relevant to marketing strategy. The relationship between most of these illustrations and the specific theoretical concepts presented in the book is often less convincing. In four chapters near the end, the theme switches from a primarily behavioral science orientation to a marketing management orientation. These chapters deal with the retailing structure, marketing communications, marketing research and the evaluation of advertising. They would seem to present an excellent opportunity to demonstrate the applied translations of theories and empirical data discussed in previous chapters. For the most part, however, there is rather little of this. In attempting to bring together the real world of marketing and the theoretical world of the behavioral sciences, Runyon has taken on a major challenge. That theoretical world is a welter of conflicting theories and empirical findings which are typically fragmentary or not definitively conclusive. Whether or not practitioners actually have made widespread use of behavioral theory--as academicians use the term-is doubtful. Whether or not they could make much better use of it is another matter. The author recognizes such limitations but, of course, he cant escape them. There are some topics (e.g., attitude models) where Runyon seems lacking in his coverage, and others (e.g., subliminal advertising) where his conclusions could be questioned. However, he has succeeded in writing a book that is interesting, abundantly illustrated with examples of practice, well organized, generally lively in tone and easy to read. If you are looking for a text on this subject, youll do well to give this book your strong consideration.

Getting Published: Reflections of an Old Editor

David W. Stewart is Robert E. Brooker Professor of Marketing and Deputy Dean, Gordon Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California. My time as editor has been a dynamic period for the marketing community. It has witnessed the maturing of information technology, the Internet boom and bust, and the collapse of some of the most widely recognized and trusted of brands, including Andersen, Sunbeam, Oldsmobile, and Firestone. Even such seemingly powerful brands as Disney, McDonald’s, AT&T, and CocaCola have struggled. At the same time, the attention of the popular business press and the public at large has become increasingly focused on markets and marketing practices. Issues of intellectual property, consumer privacy, and fair business practices have become part of the daily business headlines. The celebrity attorney has been replaced by the celebrity chief executive officer. The locus of economic growth and new organizational forms has increasingly shifted westward from Europe, the East Coast, and the Midwest to the West Coast and Asia. The only exception to these broad shifts appears to be Japan, once feared as an economic powerhouse and now reduced to a troubled economy. Change is evitable and is what sustains the need for research and scholarship. Paradigms, assumptions, and even “facts” that dominate thought and practice at one point give way to new facts and modes of thought. In my editorial statement at the beginning of my term as editor (Stewart 1999), I discussed the role of Journal of Marketing (JM) as a tangible artifact of an intellectual community. This intellectual community is very much alive and responsive to change. It is again time for a change in the stewardship of the Journal. This change will, no doubt, bring new energy, new perspectives, and new directions to the Journal. However, editors merely manage in a modest way the real changes that occur in the intellectual discipline. Most of the articles to be published by the new editor during her first year are already written and in the review process. The problems and topics on which scholars within marketing’s intellectual community are working and will work reflect the broader social and economic environment of which marketing is a part. An editor has little, if any, influence on this environment. However, an editor plays an especially important role in ensuring that the scholarship that derives from response to change is captured and published on a timely basis. I discuss three things in my last editorial as editor: First, I describe the changes that have occurred in the Journal over the past three years. These changes suggest a great deal about the nature of the changes in markets and marketing practices that have taken place. Second, I share my perspective as an editor on what is most likely to be valuable to the discipline and find its way into the pages of the Journal. This will be a brief treatise on how to get published. Third, I acknowledge the contributions of the many people who have contributed to the Journal’s success.

From the Editors: Enhancing Marketing Theory in Academic Research

ConclusionIt may be easier to describe “what not to do” than it is to describe “what to do” when writing a conceptual or theoretical article. In this sense, the five “wrong way” signs may be of limited value. Nonetheless, it is our experience that quite a number of marketing manuscripts sometimes wander down one of these streets where strong theory is rarely present. We realize that some of our recommendations are difficult to implement. The reality is that good theoretical work is far more difficult to do and requires far greater creativity than most empirical research. This fact should not deter such efforts, and journals, includingJAMS, must work to nurture such scholarship, even in the face of a very high hurdle. Nonetheless, we believe that marketing theorists have made significant progress over the past 50 years, but, if the discipline is to play an important role in the social sciences and influence management practice, it must accelerate its efforts to create its own unique theories of markets and marketing phenomena.JAMS is a welcoming and nurturing place for such work.

Effects of Using a Nonverbal (Musical) Cue on Recall and Playback of Television Advertising: Implications for Advertising Tracking

Abstract The purpose of this research is to understand the influence of nonverbal (musical) elements on long-term memory for advertising and relationship of memory for such elements to memory for verbal elements of advertising elicited by traditional verbal cues. The study uses the dual coding framework as the basis for generating specific hypotheses about consumer memory for a television advertising campaign in response to both a verbal and a nonverbal (musical) cue. These hypotheses are tested using data generated from a representative sample of prospective buyers who were within the target audience for a broadcast television advertising campaign in a natural viewing environment. The analysis focused on the verbatim playback of the ad “trace” generated in memory in response to both verbal and nonverbal cues. The findings suggest that the responses to the nonverbal (musical) cue evoke more responses involving images and visual associations. More important, the ad “trace” retrieved from memory in response to the non-verbal (musical) cue adds power to a model predictive of the consumers consideration set of alternatives. The results have important implications for understanding advertising response and for the design of advertising tracking research.

Academic publishing in marketing: best and worst practices

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to offer observations regarding best and weak practices with respect to academic publishing in marketing.Design/methodology/approach – The approach takes the form of personal reflections based on the experience of the author as an editor of the Journal of Marketing and Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science.Findings – Interesting and novel work is most likely to be published in academic journals even when such work has methodological flaws. Research that is methodologically correct but of limited contribution is less likely to be published. Venue‐driven research, replications, most extensions of prior research and data fitting exercises are unlikely to be published in the “better” marketing journals.Practical implications – The paper offers practical advice about how to publish in the better marketing journals and how an author should manage the publication process.Originality/value – The paper offers observations regarding best and weak practices with respect t...