Money Talks: Perceived Advertising Expense and Expected Product Quality

Abstract

Does the perceived expense of a new product's advertising campaign influence expectations about the product's quality? This article conceptualizes the process by which perceived advertising expense acts as a cue to quality. Results from six experiments indicate that under some conditions, knowledge of cost-related campaign elements can evoke advertising expense inferences that influence quality predictions, and these inferences may be spontaneous.T he perceived expense of a new product's advertising campaign can influence consumers' expectations about the product's quality. In judging product quality, consumers use intrinsic cues-information about quality-related product features-as well as extrinsic cues, such as price or brand name (Olson 1977). We explore the notion that perceived advertising expense operates as an extrinsic quality cue under some conditions.The process by which perceived advertising expense affects quality expectations involves two information processing activities. A consumer must first encode information that conveys perceived advertising expense directly or by association; this belief about advertising expense must, in turn, evoke a tentative product quality association or inference. These activities may involve conscious reasoning or, like other familiar cognitive activities, may have become automatized over time. The impact of perceived advertising expense should be strongest when other cues are unavailable, cursorily processed, ambiguous, or irrelevant (Olson 1977;Zeithaml 1988). Its impact should be weakest when people deeply process relevant information about a new product's features.Basic questions that arise regarding the process by which perceived advertising expense influences quality expectations concern why and when people might use perceived expense as a cue to a new product's quality. We identify several possible explanations:

Sponsorship-Linked Marketing: Opening the Black Box

“…Thus, experience with sponsorship-linked marketing communications is argued to develop brand equity in the mind of the consumer; however, the brand equity a sponsor brings into an association infiuences information processing of that association. Substantial investments in marketing communications can serve as a signal of brand quality (Kirmani and Wright 1989). Differences in processing sponsorship stimuli between events with high-equity sponsors and low-equity sponsors is attributed to consumers having more accessible brand associations for high-equity brands than for low-equity brands.…”

Why Might Organic Labels Fail to Influence Consumer Choices? Marginal Labelling and Brand Equity Effects

“…More generally, we suggest that research consider the interaction effect of labels with other signals of quality, such as warranty offers (Boulding and Kirmani 1993;Cooper and Ross 1985;Grossman 1981), advertising expenditures (Kirmani 1997;Kirmani and Wright 1989;Nelson 1974), store reputation (Rao and Monroe 1988), high market share (Hellofs and Jacobson 1999), or other labels, such as a possible CO 2 footprint label. All these cues are likely to moderate the impact of the organic label.…”

Information versus persuasion : la controverse autour de l’impact de la publicité sur les préférences des consommateurs

“…Les dépenses publicitaires consenties sur le bien de qualité haute génèrent des retombées informationnelles (spillover effects) permettant aux consommateurs d'apprécier le différentiel de qualités entre les deux biens. D'autres études, telles que celles de Kirmani et Wright (1989), Kirmani (1990Kirmani ( , 1997, Homer (1995), Moorthy et Zhao (2000) et Moorthy et Hawkins (2005), exposent que le niveau de dépenses publicitaires ainsi que la répétition des messages publicitaires conduiraient les consommateurs, par inférence, à une estimation de la qualité des produits -surtout dans le cas d'une publicité à faible contenu informatif. Kirmani (1990) et Homer (1995 proposent par exemple l'existence d'une relation en forme de U inversé entre dépenses publicitaires (ou répétition des messages publicitaires) et perception de la qualité des biens.…”