Environmental communications often contain assertive commands, even though research in consumer behavior, psycholinguistics, and communications has repeatedly shown that gentler phrasing is more effective when seeking consumer compliance. This article shows that the persuasiveness of assertive language depends on the perceived importance of the issue at hand: Recipients respond better to pushy requests in domains that they view as important, but they need more suggestive appeals when they lack initial conviction. The authors examine this effect in three laboratory studies and one field experiment using Google AdWords. Their findings refer to various environmental contexts (i.e., economizing water, recycling plastic containers, reducing air and sea pollution). The key implication of these findings is that issue importance needs to be carefully assessed (or affected) before the language of effective environmental campaigns can be selected.
Several studies have shown that promotions of national brands yield more effect than those of store brands (e.g., Allenby and Rossi 1991, Blattberg and Wisniewski 1989). However, the evolution of price-quality data available from over the last 15 years seems to reveal a reduction of the quality gap between store brands and national brands, while price differences remain substantial. Simultaneously, the share of private label brands has increased ( 1994). In this context, we study whether we can maintain a view of the world where national brands may easily attract consumers from store brands through promotions, whereas store brands are relatively ineffective in attracting consumers from national brands by such means. We analyze consumer reactions to price discounts in a parsimonious preference model featuring loss aversion and reference-dependence along dimensions of price and quality (Hardie, Johnson, and Fader 1993, Tversky and Kahneman 1991). The key result of our analysis is that, given any two brands, there is an asymmetric promotion effect in favor of the higher quality/higher price brands if and only if the quality gap between the brands is sufficiently large in comparison with the price gap. Thus, the direction of promotion asymmetry is not unconditional. It depends uniquely on the value of the ratio of quality and price differences compared to a category specific criterion, which we call Φ. If the ratio of quality and price differences is larger than this criterion, the usual asymmetry prevails; if such is not the case, the lower quality/lower price brands promote more effectively. More precisely, our model predicts that cross promotion effects depend on two components of brand positioning in the price/quality quadrant. First, we define a variable termed “positioning advantage” that indicates whether, relative to the standards achieved by another brand, a given brand is underpriced (positive advantage) or overpriced (negative advantage). Promotion effectiveness is increasing in this variable. Second, cross promotion effects between two brands depend on their distance in the price/quality quadrant. This variable impacts promotion effectiveness negatively and symmetrically for any pair of brands. “Positioning advantage” and “brand distance” are orthogonal components of brand positioning, irrespective of the degree of correlation between available price and quality levels in the market. Empirically, we investigate the role of brand positioning in explaining cross promotion effects using panel data from the chilled orange juice and peanut butter categories. We compute the independent positioning variables, “positioning advantage” and “brand distance,” from readily available data on price and quality positioning after obtaining our estimates of Φ. We next measure promotion effectiveness by estimating choice share changes in response to a price discount, using a choice model that does not contain any information about quality/price ratios. Finally, we test the relation between the two positioning variables an...
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