Rik Pieters

Attention Capture and Transfer in Advertising: Brand, Pictorial, and Text-Size Effects

The three key ad elements (brand, pictorial, and text) each have unique superiority effects on attention to advertisements, which are on par with many commonly held ideas in marketing practice. This is the main conclusion of an analysis of 1363 print advertisements tested with infrared eye-tracking methodology on more than 3600 consumers. The pictorial is superior in capturing attention, independent of its size. The text element best captures attention in direct proportion to its surface size. The brand element most effectively transfers attention to the other elements. Only increments in the text elements surface size produce a net gain in attention to the advertisement as a whole. The authors discuss how their findings can be used to render more effective decisions in advertising.

Goal-directed Emotions

This research explores the role of emotions in goal-directed behaviour. A model is provided for an emotional goal system whereby appraisals of the consequences of achieving or not achieving a goal are hypothesised to elicit anticipatory emotions; the anticipatory emotions are expected, in turn, to contribute to volitions in the service of goal pursuit (namely, intentions, plans, and the decision to expend energy); goal-directed behaviours next arise in response to volitions and lead to goal attainment; and the latter then functions as the basis for a new set of appraisals and accompanying goaloutcome emotions. The model was tested in a longitudinal study of the responses of 406 adults (243 women, 163 men) in The Netherlands. The context for the study was the regulation of ones bodyweight via exercising and dieting.

The Structural Influence of Marketing Journals: A Citation Analysis of the Discipline and Its Subareas Over Time

The authors investigate the overall and subarea influence of a comprehensive set of marketing and marketing-related journals at three points in time during a 30-year period using a citation-based measure of structural influence. The results show that a few journals wield a disproportionate amount of influence in the marketing journal network as a whole and that influential journals tend to derive their influence from many different journals. Different journals are most influential in different subareas of marketing; general business and managerially oriented journals have lost influence, whereas more specialized marketing journals have gained in influence over time. The Journal of Marketing emerges as the most influential marketing journal in the final period (1996–97) and as the journal with the broadest span of influence across all subareas. Yet the Journal of Marketing is notably influential among applied marketing journals, which themselves are of lesser influence. The index of structural influence is significantly correlated with other objective and subjective measures of influence but least so with the impact factors reported in the Social Sciences Citation Index. Overall, the findings demonstrate the rapid maturation of the marketing discipline and the changing role of key journals in the process.

Visual Attention During Brand Choice : The Impact of Time Pressure and Task Motivation

Measures derived from eye-movement data reveal that during brand choice consumers adapt to time pressure by accelerating the visual scanning sequence, by filtering information and by changing their scanning strategy. In addition, consumers with high task motivation filter brand information less and pictorial information more. Consumers under time pressure filter textual ingredient information more, and pictorial information less. The results of a conditional logit analysis reveal that the chosen brand receives significantly more intra-brand and inter-brand saccades and longer fixation durations than non-chosen brands, independent of time pressure and task motivation conditions. Implications for the theory of consumer attention and for pretesting of packaging and shelf lay-outs are discussed.

New Empirical Generalizations on the Determinants of Price Elasticity

The importance of pricing decisions for firms has fueled an extensive stream of research on price elasticities. In an influential meta-analytical study, Tellis (1988) summarized price elasticity research findings until 1986. However, empirical generalizations on price elasticity require modifications because of (1) changes in market characteristics (i.e., characteristics of brands, product categories, and economic conditions) and (2) changes in the research methodology used to assess price elasticities. Therefore, the authors present a meta-analysis of price elasticity with new empirical generalizations on its determinants. Across a set of 1851 price elasticities based on 81 studies, the average price elasticity is −2.62. A salient finding is that over the past four decades, sales elasticities have significantly increased in magnitude, whereas share and choice elasticities have remained fairly constant. The authors find that accommodating price endogeneity has a strong (magnitude-increasing) impact on price elasticities. A striking null result is that accounting for heterogeneity does not affect elasticities significantly. The authors also present an analysis that explains the difference between their findings and Telliss findings, and they indicate which new price elasticity studies are most desirable.

Comparing Service Delivery to What Might Have Been: Behavioral Responses to Regret and Disappointment

The effects of the specific emotions disappointment and regret on customers’ behavioral responses to failed service encounters were examined. Study 1, using a vignette methodology, showed that regret was more associated with switching behavior than was disappointment and that disappointment was more associated with word of mouth and complaining than was regret. These results were largely replicated in Study 2, in which each customer was asked to report an autobiographical episode in which he or she experienced dissatisfaction with a service. Characteristics of this experience, as well as regret, disappointment, satisfaction, and behavioral responses, were assessed. As hypothesized, regret had a direct effect on customers’ switching, over and above the effect of dissatisfaction. Moreover, disappointment had a direct effect on word of mouth, over and above the effect of dissatisfaction. Finally, neither regret nor disappointment had a direct effect on the actual complaining in Study 2.

Meta-analysis in marketing when studies contain multiple measurements

Most meta-analyses in marketing contain studies which themselves contain multiple measurements of the focal effect. This paper compares alternative procedures to deal with multiple measurements through the analysis of synthetic data sets in a Monte Carlo study and a re-analysis of a published marketing data set. We show that the choice of procedure to deal with multiple measurements is by no means trivial and that it has implications for the results and for the validity of the generalizations derived from meta-analyses. Procedures that use the complete set of measurements outperform procedures that represent each study by a single value. The commonly used method of treating all measurements as independent performs reasonably well but is not preferable. We show that the optimal procedure to account for multiple measurements in meta-analysis explicitly deals with the nested error structure, i.e., at the measurement level and at the study level, which has not been practiced before in marketing meta-analyses.

Dynamics of multiple-goal pursuit

The authors propose and test a model of multiple-goal pursuit that specifies how individuals allocate effort among multiple goals over time. The model predicts that whether individuals decide to step up effort, coast, abandon the current goal, or switch to pursue another goal is determined jointly by the emotions that flow from prior goal progress and the proximity to future goal attainment, and proximally determined by changes in expectancies about goal attainment. Results from a longitudinal diary study and 2 experiments show that positive and negative goal-related emotions can have diametrically opposing effects on goal-directed behavior, depending on the individuals proximity to goal attainment. The findings resolve contrasting predictions about the influence of positive and negative emotions in volitional behavior, critically amend the goal gradient hypothesis, and provide new insights into the dynamics and determinants of multiple-goal pursuit.

Leveling up and down: the experiences of benign and malicious envy.

Envy is the painful emotion caused by the good fortune of others. This research empirically supports the distinction between two qualitatively different types of envy, namely benign and malicious envy. It reveals that the experience of benign envy leads to a moving-up motivation aimed at improving ones own position, whereas the experience of malicious envy leads to a pulling-down motivation aimed at damaging the position of the superior other. Study 1 used guided recall of the two envy types in a culture (the Netherlands) that has separate words for benign and malicious envy. Analyses of the experiential content of these emotions found the predicted differences. Study 2 and 3 used one sample from the United States and one from Spain, respectively, where a single word exists for both envy types. A latent class analysis based on the experiential content of envy confirmed the existence of separate experiences of benign and malicious envy in both these cultures as well. The authors discuss the implications of distinguishing the two envy types for theories of cooperation, group performance, and Schadenfreude.

Using means-end structures for benefit segmentation : An application to services

Although the basic idea of benefit segmentation lies in using causal, as opposed to descriptive, factors as segmentation criteria, most of the empirical studies do not differentiate between product attributes and the benefit sought by consumers. The objectives of this article are to clarify the distinction between attributes and benefits sought, and to apply a modified laddering technique, based on means‐end theory to use the elicited benefits to form benefit segments. A comparison with attribute‐based segments demonstrates that means‐end chains provide a powerful tool for “true” benefit segmentation.