Prashant Malaviya

Consumers' Processing of Persuasive Advertisements: An Integrative Framework of Persuasion Theories

In this article, the authors propose an integrative model of advertising persuasion that orders the major theories and empirically supported generalizations about persuasion that have been offered ...

The Effect of Type of Elaboration on Advertisement Processing and Judgment

The authors examine the effect of type of elaboration on information processing and product judgments. Research participants were shown print advertisements promoting a camera in which the pictoria...

Consumer-Generated Ads: Does Awareness of Advertising Co-Creation Help or Hurt Persuasion?

Companies increasingly involve consumers in the process of developing advertising and other marketing actions. An important question that has not been explored is whether brands benefit from communicating to consumers who had not been involved in the co-creation process that a target ad was developed by a fellow consumer. The authors propose a skepticism–identification model of ad creator influence, which hypothesizes that disclosing to an audience that an ad was created by a consumer triggers two opposing effects: skepticism about the competence of the ad creator and identification with the ad creator. Four studies demonstrate that the effectiveness of disclosing advertising co-creation depends on factors that hinder skepticism and heighten identification with the ad creator. Specifically, attributing the ad to a consumer is shown to increase persuasion when the audience (1) has limited cognitive resources to scrutinize the message, (2) is given background information about the ad creator that enhances source similarity, and (3) has high loyalty toward the brand. The implications of these findings on marketing theory and practice are discussed.

Information accessibility as a moderator of judgments : The role of content versus retrieval ease

We hypothesize that the accessibility of task-relevant knowledge determines whether judgments reflect the substance of the information that is brought to mind or the ease of generating and retrieving such information. Our findings indicate that when relevant knowledge is highly accessible or not at all accessible, judgments are based on the content of the information considered. Between these extremes in knowledge accessibility, judgments are based on the perceived ease with which information can be retrieved. This perceived ease is a function of both the number of reasons requested and the wording of the retrieval request. (c) 2005 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..

The Moderating Influence of Advertising Context on Ad Repetition Effects: The Role of Amount and Type of Elaboration

Although several advertising studies report that message repetition leads to favorable evaluation of the advertised brand, a surprisingly large number of studies fail to find this repetition effect. This article investigates the influence of the advertising context in which the ad is presented on the repetition effect. The ad context, along with the ad content and individual differences in expertise, are found to influence the type of elaboration (item-specific and relational elaboration) a message receives. Message repetition affects evaluation when the additional exposures facilitate the complementary generation of these two types of elaboration of the ad message. When either type of elaboration dominates or when the message recipient spontaneously generates the impoverished type of elaboration, the effect of ad repetition is not observed. These findings provide evidence for the distinct influence on evaluation of the amount and type of elaboration that an advertising message receives.

Ad repetition in a cluttered environment: The influence of type of processing

Advertising repetition is frequently used to influence consumers’ judgments of an advertised product. Several studies have found that when the target ad is repeated in a cluttered environment, repetition may not affect judgments. These findings have provoked little interest because they seem to be attributable to the interference introduced by the cluttered environments. The implication is that a substantial number of exposures to the target ad would be needed before an effect of ad repetition on product judgments would be observed. Based on recent research, this article offers and tests an alternative account. The hypothesis is that the nature of the environment in which an ad is repeated can affect the occurrence of two types of target ad processing: item-specific and relational. The type(s) of processing the ad receives, in turn, affects ad recipients’ learning and judgments of ad-related information. q 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. There is substantial evidence that varying the number of exposures to an advertising message influences its persuasive impact when the target ad is the only stimulus to which subjects are exposed (Anand &

The Influence of Negation on Product Evaluations

The persuasive impact of a negation (“not difficult to use”) is shown to depend on the allocation of cognitive resources. When resources are substantial, a brand is evaluated more favorably when a negation is positively valenced (“not difficult to use”) than when it is negatively valenced (“not easy to use”). Under limited resources, a negation has no effect. Between these extremes in resource allocation, the brand is evaluated more favorably when the negation is negatively valenced than when it is positively valenced. Further, this outcome under moderate resources occurs even though respondents represent the negation accurately in memory. These findings provide evidence that the processing of a negation follows a specific sequence such that the affirmation (“difficult to use”) is elaborated first, and then the negator tag (“not”) is incorporated in judgment.

The Moderating Effect of Product Category Knowledge and Attribute Importance on the Attraction Effect

This paper explores the moderating effect of product category knowledge and attribute importance on the attraction effect. The results of our study point to several boundary conditions of the effect. For consumers who have a moderate level of product category knowledge, and for consumers who assign more importance to one product attribute over the other, the attraction effect was strongest. In contrast, the attraction effect was diminished, in some cases to insignificant levels, for consumers with a high or low level of product category knowledge, and for consumers who consider both product attributes about equally important.

Parity product features can enhance or dilute brand evaluation: The influence of goal orientation and presentation format

Two studies examine the impact of adding parity features to an advertising message that compares a dominant target brand to a competitor. We document that in some instances the presence of parity features prompts more favorable target evaluations (enhancement), whereas in others it results in more negative evaluations of the target (dilution). We predict when each of these outcomes will occur on the basis of a fit between an individuals regulatory goal focus and the means of goal pursuit depicted in the message presentation. Enhancement occurs when there is a fit between an individuals regulatory goal and how message information is presented, and dilution occurs when there is nonfit. (c) 2008 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..

The Influence of Choice Justification and Stimulus Meaningfulness on the Attraction Effect

The “attraction effect” occurs when preference fora target product increases relative to a competitor when a choice option that is dominated by the target brand, but not by the competitor brand, is included in the choice set. The present article offers an explanation for this outcome in terms of two principles of consumer information processing: data deficiency and cognitive resource deficiency. Specifically, results from a lab experiment with 234 student respondents show that when product information is relatively “meaningless” and thus, data deficient, making respondents allocate greater cognitive resources to the decision task by asking them to justify their decision, increases the attraction effect. However, when the product information is quite “meaningful” and thus, not data deficient, increasing resource allocation by instructing respondents to justify choice, decreases the attraction effect. We propose that when the stimulus is less meaningful, the additional processing effort that justification induces is used to generate heuristics to justify choice, which enhance the attraction effect. However, when the stimulus is more meaningful, justification induces respondents to make choices based on a consideration of the meaningful information that is provided, without the biasing influence of the context, thus diminishing the attraction effect. The implications of these findings for marketing and future research directions are highlighted.