Irene Santoso, Malcolm J. Wright, Giang Trinh and Mark Avis
This study aims to investigate whether digital advertising can be effective despite consumer inattention and how certain common combinations of ad characteristics increase or…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to investigate whether digital advertising can be effective despite consumer inattention and how certain common combinations of ad characteristics increase or decrease ad effectiveness under conditions of low attention.
Design/methodology/approach
Using two online experiments in naturalistic environment, the authors compare ad effects under focussed, divided and incidental attention, for certain ad characteristics, namely, appeal type and (mis)matching between appeal and brand type. The results are analysed using logistic regression.
Findings
Ad exposure under low attention does increase brand consideration and choice. The greatest uplift in impact occurs when moving from non-exposure to incidental attention. Under incidental attention, emotive advertising was more effective than rational advertising, as was matching rather than mismatching an emotional appeal to a hedonic brand. Conversely, under divided attention, rational advertising and mismatching a rational appeal to a hedonic brand were more effective.
Research limitations/implications
This research explores the effectiveness of Twitter ads with an emotional or a rational appeal and the (mis)matching between appeal and utilitarian or hedonic brand type. Future research can examine other formats and creative elements of digital advertising that can affect the low-attention processing and the effects that occur.
Practical implications
Intrusive, attention-getting advertising strategies may not be necessary. Certain common creative devices can increase advertising effectiveness despite low attention, so marketers can ensure consumer-centric marketing communication.
Originality/value
There has previously been limited understanding of low-attention mechanisms in advertising and little evidence of ad effectiveness under conditions of low attention. The research also demonstrates that certain ad characteristics, linked to common creative devices, enhance the impact of advertising despite low attention.
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Stephen Michael Croucher, Stephanie Kelly, Chen Hui, Kenneth J. Rocker, Joanna Cullinane, Dini Homsey, George Guoyu Ding, Thao Nguyen, Kirsty Jane Anderson, Malcolm Green, Doug Ashwell, Malcolm Wright and Nitha Palakshappa
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, this study aims to explore how working remotely might impact the superior–subordinate relationship. Specifically, this study examines how…
Abstract
Purpose
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, this study aims to explore how working remotely might impact the superior–subordinate relationship. Specifically, this study examines how immediacy explains articulated dissent, considers how an individual’s attitudes toward online communication predicts immediacy and articulated dissent and compares these relationships in England, Australia and the USA.
Design/methodology/approach
Three nations were examined: Australia, England and the USA (n = 1,776). Surveys included demographic questions and the following measures: organizational dissent scale, perceived immediacy measure, computer-mediated immediate behaviors measure and measure of online communication attitude.
Findings
The results reveal supervisors’ computer-mediated immediate behaviors and perceived immediacy both positively predict dissent. Some aspects of online communication attitudes positively predict computer-mediated immediate behaviors and perceived immediacy. In addition, attitudes toward online communication positively predict dissent. National culture influences some of these relationships; in each case the effects were substantively larger for the USA when compared to the other nations.
Originality/value
This study is the first to cross-culturally analyze dissent and immediacy. In addition, this study considers the extent to which the COVID-19 pandemic influences the superior–subordinate relationship.
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Shijiao Chen, Malcolm J. Wright, Hongzhi Gao, Huan Liu and Damien Mather
Industry-wide crises involving consumer products place consumers at risk. Consumers rely on institutions that constrain corporate practice and control product quality to reduce…
Abstract
Purpose
Industry-wide crises involving consumer products place consumers at risk. Consumers rely on institutions that constrain corporate practice and control product quality to reduce risk. As institutions vary by country, country-of-origin (COO) acts as a salient cue for consumers to identify institutional quality and thus evaluate risk when making purchase decisions. However, in the era of globalisation, identification of institutional quality becomes complex as global value chains involve different countries such as brand origin (BO) and country-of-manufacture (COM). Therefore, this research investigates how BO and COM individually and jointly affect consumers' institutional perceptions and subsequent purchase decision-making in the presence of systemic risk.
Design/methodology/approach
This research includes three studies (n = 764) employing surveys and choice modelling experiments with samples from China and the USA.
Findings
The results show that BO and COM relate to different institutional perceptions. BO evokes perceptions of legitimacy and the regulatory environment, while COM evokes perceptions of the normative and the regulatory environment. The combination of BO and COM determines how institutional quality is communicated and further affects consumers' legitimacy perceptions, preferences and willingness to pay a price premium.
Originality/value
This research contributes to understanding the effect of BO and COM in the context of complex value chains from an institutional perspective. It also provides implications for leveraging complex COO cues with BO and COM information to improve consumers' institutional perceptions.
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Philip Mecredy, Malcolm Wright, Pamela Feetham and Philip Stern
Previous research on age-related loyalty is sparse, contradictory and suffers from methodological limitations and criticisms. This study aims to apply two methodological advances…
Abstract
Purpose
Previous research on age-related loyalty is sparse, contradictory and suffers from methodological limitations and criticisms. This study aims to apply two methodological advances to fresh purchasing data to give a much clearer picture of age-related differences in brand loyalty.
Design/methodology/approach
An online brand choice survey (n = 1,862) is used to examine age-related loyalty within three low-involvement categories in New Zealand. The polarisation index (φ) is adopted as the measure of loyalty to control for confounding influences present in prior research. Results for chronological age are validated through comparison with results for measures of cognitive, biological and sociological age, as well as household life cycle.
Findings
Contrary to prior research, age-related differences in loyalty are detected in two of the three low-involvement categories studied. The third category does not show detectable loyalty for any age group. Although differences in brand loyalty are broadly present across all age measures, no alternative measure outperforms chronological age in detecting variations in age-related loyalty.
Research limitations/implications
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first evidence that age-related brand loyalty is present in low-involvement categories. However, effects are small and easily obscured by confounding factors. More research is needed to determine how results vary by category.
Practical implications
Despite showing minor differences in loyalty, older consumers still purchase from a wide portfolio of brands and so should not be ignored by marketers. Future research can investigate loyalty for older consumers by adopting the method of analysing differences in polarisation (φ) for chronological age groups.
Originality/value
Previous contradictory findings and methodological concerns about measurement of age-related loyalty are resolved through use of the polarisation index (φ) as a measure of loyalty and by confirmation that chronological age performs as well as any other age measure.
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The purpose of this paper is to discuss Armstrong et al.’s (2016) finding that ads that more closely follow evidence-based persuasion principles also achieve higher…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to discuss Armstrong et al.’s (2016) finding that ads that more closely follow evidence-based persuasion principles also achieve higher day-after-recall.
Design/methodology/approach
The author evaluates the importance of Armstrong et al.’s result and considers the criticisms that their work only examines some aspects of persuasion and that their dependent variable is known to have a low correlation with sales.
Findings
Armstrong et al.’s result provides a major advance in the knowledge of persuasive advertising. While they do not examine all aspects of persuasion, the scope of their tests is still very extensive. Day-after-recall is also arguably a better measure of advertising effectiveness than sales impact, due to the difficulty of identifying small sales changes among the random fluctuations that constantly occur in most markets and given the known processes by which consumer memory operates.
Originality/value
By synthesising prior work on advertising and consumer memory, the author provides a simple model of how advertising interacts with memory. This model explains why ad recall ought to be poorly correlated with sales, and highlights the need for Armstrong et al.’s result to be followed by further research into how contextual cues at the point of purchase affect memory retrieval and brand choice.
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In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of…
Abstract
In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.
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Naomi Smith, Marianne Clark and Clare Southerton
The ‘fit healthy’ body has been invoked in popular discourse as far less vulnerable to communicable diseases like the novel coronavirus both in mainstream accounts of the pandemic…
Abstract
The ‘fit healthy’ body has been invoked in popular discourse as far less vulnerable to communicable diseases like the novel coronavirus both in mainstream accounts of the pandemic and in more fringe anti-vaccine discourse. Those opposed to vaccination argue the management of the body through diet and exercise allows for natural immune processes to manage COVID-19. This chapter interrogates anti-vaccine sentiment in Western countries such as Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States to demonstrate the pervasiveness of discourses that position the maintenance of a ‘fit healthy’ ideal body as an alternative to preventative medicine such as vaccines. Drawing on several key examples, this conceptual chapter explores the ways bodily ‘wellness’ became a part of vaccine hesitancy discourse during the pandemic, as risk is balanced through calculations of what vaccines might ‘do’ to a body and the body’s capacity to respond to illness.
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Times were tough for the heads of Australian independent schools in the 1950s and 1960s. In New South Wales alone, Knox Grammar School lost two, Barker College and P. L. C…
Abstract
Times were tough for the heads of Australian independent schools in the 1950s and 1960s. In New South Wales alone, Knox Grammar School lost two, Barker College and P. L. C. Croydon one each in the 1950s and Newington College had lost two and Meriden School one in the 1960s. And in 1965, Allen McLucas was forced to resign from The Scots College Sydney. Behind these problems of governance and leadership in independent schools lay deeper social and moral changes in the broader community and changing educational philosophies.
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Roman Konopka, Malcolm John Wright, Mark Avis and Pamela M. Feetham
There are substantive disagreements about whether encouraging deliberative thinking increases consumer preference in low-involvement product categories. The authors draw on…
Abstract
Purpose
There are substantive disagreements about whether encouraging deliberative thinking increases consumer preference in low-involvement product categories. The authors draw on dual-process theory to add rare experimental evidence to this debate. They also investigate whether the effect of deliberative thinking increases with familiarity of the stimuli, as different theories of memory yield different predictions on this point. Finally, they provide evidence on whether the effectiveness of the Fairtrade logo arises more from mere exposure or attention to the ethical claim.
Design/methodology/approach
The context for the research is the use of ethical logos in packaged coffee, as this provides a realistic setting for the desired experimental manipulations. The fieldwork consists of two sets of trade-off experiments – rankings based conjoint analysis (n = 360) and best-worst scaling with a balanced incomplete block design (n = 1,628). Deliberative thinking is manipulated in three ways: by varying logos between visual (Type 1 processing) and lexical (Type 2 processing) treatments, by post hoc classification of time taken, and by imposing either time constraints (Type 1) or cognitive load (Type 2) on the completion of the task. Familiarity is manipulated by varying logos between the Fairtrade and a fictional Exchange Ethics logo.
Findings
Consumers do have higher preferences in the deliberative treatment conditions; thinking more results in an 18 per cent increase (Cohen’s d = 0.25) in the preference for choices that display an ethical cobranded logo. Surprisingly, the impact of deliberation is not greater for the more familiar Fairtrade logo than the fictional Exchange Ethics logo. This result is inconsistent with strength-based theories of memory, as these predict that deliberation will have a greater effect for more familiar stimuli. However, it is consistent with newer theories of memory that acknowledge familiarity can lead to activation confusion, reducing retrieval of pre-existing knowledge into working memory. The research also shows that the Fairtrade logo has substantial utility to consumers, and that this is approximately 59 per cent due to the ethical claim and 41 per cent due to the familiarity of the logo.
Research limitations/implications
In field conditions, attempts to manipulate deliberation may not be effective or may simply result in reduced attention. Also, the costs of increasing deliberation may outweigh the benefits obtained.
Practical implications
The research confirms the heuristic value of the Fairtrade logo and shows that the effectiveness of ethical logos may increase with additional deliberation by shoppers.
Originality/value
There is relatively little work in marketing that applies dual-process theories to investigate consumer behaviour. The present study extends the use of dual-process theories in marketing, demonstrates a new method to investigate the effect of deliberation on brand choice and shows how deliberation magnifies the effect of endorsing logos, including unfamiliar logos.
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This chapter explores the potential of transnational history for researching global higher education policy. It begins with an overview of transnational history as a perspective…
Abstract
This chapter explores the potential of transnational history for researching global higher education policy. It begins with an overview of transnational history as a perspective, demonstrating how it is, in part, a response to processes of globalization that have also transformed contemporary higher education. Second, it reviews key features of transnational history as a perspective that can enhance global higher education policy research. The third part takes dimensions of contemporary global higher education and discusses how these can be approached through a transnational historical perspective drawing on the features outlined. The chapter concludes by highlighting how a transnational historical approach can enable new insights and research questions as well as some challenges presented by this perspective. The spatial focus of the chapter is predominantly European higher education, though the implications are more general.