Michael L. Ray

Affective Responses Mediating Acceptance of Advertising

This article argues that affective responses (ARs) should supplement the cognitive responses more often studied in communication research. ARs are not evaluative responses to an advertisement, but represent the moods and feelings evoked by the ad. The literature on ARs is reviewed, and a typology for such responses is presented. Three ARs are studied empirically; they appear to be antecedents of the attitude towards the ad ( A ad ) and to have a weak but significant impact on brand attitudes.

Situational Effects of Advertising Repetition: The Moderating Influence of Motivation, Ability, and Opportunity to Respond

It is argued theoretically that the attitudinal gain from advertising repetition should continue to increase rather than level off when consumers fail to generate cognitive responses to message arguments in earlier exposures. An experiment shows that repetition continues to increase brand attitudes and purchase intentions in conditions where support and counter argument production is expected to be low, but that these attitudinal gains level off under conditions in which a high level of such production is expected.

Fear: The Potential of an Appeal Neglected by Marketing

Considerable social psychology and communications research show that intelligent use of fear messages can have favorable effects on attitude change and action. Yet the unique persuasive possibilities offered by the fear appeal have been neglected by marketing. This is in sharp contrast to the creative pursuit of positive advertising appeals. This article presents a marketing-oriented discussion and summary of research on the fear appeal.

Involvement and Political Advertising Effect An Exploratory Experiment

Data from a laboratory experiment which examines the relationship among awareness, attitude formation, and intent to behave over several levels of election races and several levels of advertising show that behavior is easily influencable by a high repetition level of innocuous advertising in the lower-level election; this phenomenon does not hold in the higher-level races. Furthermore, the authors find that this change in behavior is accomplished without an accompanying shift in attitude. Finally, it is found that the shift occurs equally among those subjects who were evaluated as having high involvement with the political process and those evaluated as having low involvement.

Advertising-Selling Interactions: An Attribution Theory Experiment

Two common assumptions about advertising-selling interactions are challenged by a field experiment. The generality of “advertising paves the way for selling” is questioned by results showing sellin...

Increasing Cognitive Response Sensitivity

Traditional cognitive response elicitation procedures may not be sensitive enough to elicit the stylized and subtle thoughts that are generated during exposure to certain types of ads. When these types of thoughts are the focus of a researcher’s work, it is critical that he or she develop a procedure that has the sensitivity to elicit them without being reactive. A laboratory study examines two different procedures for eliciting cognitive responses: pre-exposure elicitation exercises, and directed post-exposure instructions. The results suggest that each procedure raises measurement sensitivity, but that there is no advantage in combining them. General guidelines are then presented for developing stylized cognitive response elicitation procedures.

Analysis Techniques for Exploratory Use of the Multitrait-Multimethod Matrix

Methods for analyzing the multitrait-multimethod matrix are reviewed and the results of their application to a classic data set are compared. It is shown that different analysis methods can yield different validity conclusions, and that the results obtained are partly dependent on the subjective judgments of the users. It is proposed that several analysis methods should be used in tandem on each data set and their results should be examined for convergence. Multitrait-multimethod matrices should be examined in an exploratory as well as validity testing mode so as not to waste their rich data content.

The Relevance of Consumer Information Processing Studies to Communication Research

EDITORS’ NOTE: Publication of this special issue was facilitate by a grant t from the Marketing Science Institute. The editors are especially grateful to the institute’s director, Stephen A. Greyser, for his advice and encouragement during this project. Thanks to his help there are more doors opened to the multiroomed mansion of consumer information processing. Consumer behavior researchers and communication researchers are not