Heather Honea

The Nature of Self-Reported Guilt in Consumption Contexts

This research uses consumer guilt narratives to identify a typology for consumption related guilt. Three major dimensions of guilt circumstances emerged involving other individuals, societal standards, and more specific situations related to oneself. The connection between categories of consumer guilt experience and the resulting consumer response is also explored, with resulting consumer actions involving amendment, rationalization, and/or denial to resolve guilt experienced. The findings are integrated into a general discussion of the theoretical and substantive implications and the potential avenues for future research in the area.

DO NOT WAIT TO REVEAL THE BRAND NAME The Effect of Brand-Name Placement on Television Advertising Effectiveness

Is advertising more effective when the advertised brand name is revealed at the onset of an advertising message or when it is withheld until the end of the message? Given the propensity of advertising to withhold the brand name, advertisers apparently presume the latter, perhaps because they believe that the practice sustains attention to the advertisement. The network model of memory and related theories of associative learning imply superior advertising effectiveness when the brand name is presented at the beginning of an advertisement. An experiment was conducted to test this proposition. Several award-winning television advertisements were remastered to reveal the brand name either at the beginning or at the end of the spot. The results support the prediction that advertising is more effective when the brand name appears at the beginning of the advertisement. Evidence is consistent with the conclusion that the effect was caused by strengthening the memory association between the brand name and the evaluative implications of advertising content, not by any effect of brand-name placement on advertising liking, memory for the brand name, or accessibility to advertisement content.

Targeting Social Messages with Emotions of Change: The Call for Optimism

With the goal to improve the effectiveness and impact of communication messages delivered by social marketers, this research focuses on understanding variables that may be relevant in developing effective social marketing messages for the substantive domain of disposable plastic bottled water consumption. The authors examine the affective states associated with different stages of consumer change related to wasteful repetitive consumption behavior (i.e., disposable plastic bottled water consumption). With two empirical studies, the authors identify guilt, hope, pride, and optimism as relevant triggers of increased intent to manage personal consumption in pursuit of a desirable social outcome (i.e., reduction of disposable plastic bottled water consumption). While guilt, hope, and pride are relevant self-referential emotions to initial stages of change (Study 1), optimism is a principal construct in motivating people to adopt and maintain the behavior over time (Study 2). These results have valuable theoretical and practical implications for social marketers and public policy makers.

Evidence Items as Signals of Marketing Competencies and Workplace Readiness: A Practitioner Perspective:

Although past research has spent considerable effort identifying competencies and academic activities that are associated with workplace readiness, the literature is largely silent regarding what might best serve as evidence to employers that a graduate possesses specific marketing competencies. In the current research, we develop a comprehensive set of evidence items that serve as potential signals of specific macro and micro competencies demanded for marketing graduates’ employability. Specifically, we first systematically compile a list of evidence items and then explore what employers perceive to be compelling evidence of graduates’ competencies. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to capture and compare multiple evidence items related to academic curriculum, standardized measures, experience-based indicators, and the social-collaborative media environment and connect them to specific competencies as signals of workplace readiness. This research provides insights regarding how marketing curriculum should be leveraged in terms of assessments and deliverables that could be used by students to signal workplace readiness to employers.