Pamela W. Henderson

Impression Management Using Typeface Design

This article develops empirically based guidelines to help managers select typefaces that affect strategically valued impressions. The authors discuss the potential trade-offs among the impressions created by typeface (e.g., pleasing, engaging, reassuring, prominent). The selection of typeface can be simplified with the use of six underlying design dimensions: elaborate, harmony, natural, flourish, weight, and compressed.

Mental accounting and categorization

Abstract Mental accounting is an oft-discussed type of decision framing in which individuals are hypothesized to form psychological accounts of the advantages and disadvantages of an event or option. Most discussions of mental accounting have focused on the consequences of framing decisions in this manner rather than on the processes underlying mental accounting. Close examination of these processes suggests they are the same as the processes described in categorization, schema, and script theories. The present manuscript provides insights into the processes hypothesized to underlie mental accounting. This is accomplished by documenting the conceptual equivalence of selected categorization and mental accounting principles and by using empirical data to illustrate the similarity of the principles. In doing so, a mental account is treated as a type of category.

Cross-National Logo Evaluation Analysis: An Individual-Level Approach

The universality of design perception and response is tested using data collected from ten countries: Argentina, Australia, China, Germany, Great Britain, India, the Netherlands, Russia, Singapore, and the United States. A Bayesian, finite-mixture, structural-equation model is developed that identifies latent logo clusters while accounting for heterogeneity in evaluations. The concomitant variable approach allows cluster probabilities to be country specific. Rather than a priori defined clusters, our procedure provides a posteriori cross-national logo clusters based on consumer response similarity. To compare the a posteriori cross-national logo clusters, our approach is integrated with Steenkamp and Baumgartner’s (1998) measurement invariance methodology. Our model reduces the ten countries to three cross-national clusters that respond differently to logo design dimensions: the West, Asia, and Russia. The dimensions underlying design are found to be similar across countries, suggesting that elaborateness, naturalness, and harmony are universal design dimensions. Responses (affect, shared meaning, subjective familiarity, and true and false recognition) to logo design dimensions (elaborateness, naturalness, and harmony) and elements (repetition, proportion, and parallelism) are also relatively consistent, although we find minor differences across clusters. Our results suggest that managers can implement a global logo strategy, but they also can optimize logos for specific countries if desired.

An Investigation of Service Provider Choice: Ethnic Identity or Better Service?

A survey of Mexican-Americans was conducted to investigate the relationship between variables related to service quality and ethnic identification and the choice of an Hispanic service provider versus a non-Hispanic service provider. -Selection of Mexican-American service providers is found to be based on the respondent’s perception that they provide better and more friendly service, rather than her/his strength of ethnic identification.

Measuring Misinformation in Repeat Trial Pick 1 of 2 Tests.

An extension is described to a product testing model to account for misinformation among subjects. A misinformed subject is one who associates the taste of product A with product B and vice-versa; thus, the subject would tend to perform incorrectly on pick 1 of 2 tests. A likelihood ratio test for the presence of misinformation is described. The model is applied to a data set, and misinformation is found to exist. Biases due to model misspecificationand other implications for product testing are discussed.