Weathering product-harm crises.

Product-harm crises can seriously imperil a brand's performance. Consumers tend to weigh negative publicity heavily in product judgments, customer preferences may shift towards competing products during the recall period, and competitors often increase their advertising spending in the wake of a brand's misfortune. To counter these negative effects, brands hope to capitalize on their equity, and often use advertising as a communication device to regain customers' lost trust. We develop a multiple-event hazard model to study how consumer characteristics and advertising influence consumers' first-purchase decisions for two affected brands of peanut butter following a severe Australian product-harm crisis. Buying a recently affected brand is perceived as highly risky, making the trial purchase a first hurdle to be taken in the brand's recovery. Both pre-crisis loyalty and familiarity are found to form an important buffer against the product-harm crisis, supporting the idea that a brand's equity prior to the crisis offers resilience in the face of misfortune. Also heavy users tend to purchase the affected brands sooner, unless their usage rate decreased significantly during the crisis. Brand advertising was found to be effective for the stronger brand, but not for the weaker brand, while competitive advertising delayed the first-purchase decision for both brands affected by the crisis.(pro-environmental) attitudes; Behavior; Claim; Cognitive; Consumption; Control; Control theory; Decision; Decisions; Demand; Ecological consumer behaviour; Effects; Ego depletion; Implications; Marketing; Model; Performance; Research; Self-control; Self-perception theory; Social marketing; Studies; Theory; Product; Judgments; Preference; Recall; Advertising; Brands; Communication; Trust; Characteristics; Loyalty;

Personal relevance in story reading: a research review

Although personal relevance is key to sustaining an audience’s interest in any given narrative, it has received little systematic attention in scholarship to date. Across centuries and media, adaptations have been used extensively to bring temporally or geographically distant narratives “closer” to the recipient under the assumption that their impact will increase. In this review article, we review experimental and other empirical evidence on narrative processing in order to unravel which types of personal relevance are more likely to be impactful than others, which types of impact (e.g. aesthetic, therapeutic, persuasive) they have been found to generate, and where their power may become excessive or outright detrimental to reader experience

Discount Coupons: Beyond the Price Discount Effect

Paper included in Proceedings from the Promotion in the Marketing Mix: What Works, Where and Why, NEC-63 Conference, Toronto, Canada, 1994. Ellen Goddard and Daphne Taylor, editors, pp.42-52.Consumer/Household Economics, Demand and Price Analysis,

CONSUMER IDENTITY AND IMPLICATIONS FOR THE BRAND

In a consumer culture people no longer consume for merely functional satisfaction,but consumption becomes meaning-based, and brands are often used as symbolic resources for theconstruction and maintenance of identity. All human behavior is a symbolic action. People are notjust choosing the best, the fanciest, or the cheapest brands. They’re choosing brands that have theright meaning. Brands are now creating value not just by the products or services they represent,but by the meanings they generate. This meaning is being adopted by consumers to express whothey are and what they stand for. Meaning, in fact, may be the most important product a brandcreates today.identity, consumer divergence, reference groups, brand image, brand culture

Attention to Social Comparison Information: An Individual Difference Factor Affecting Consumer Conformity

Interpersonal influence in consumer behavior is moderated by the extent of consumer sensitivity to social comparison information concerning product purchase and usage behavior (cf. Calder and Burnkrant 1977). Two survey studies indicate that Lennox and Wolfe\u27s (1984) attention-to-social-comparison-information (AT-SCI) scale has adequate convergent and discriminant validity and moderates the relative influence of normative consequences on behavioral intentions, as predicted. A quasi-experiment and an experiment in which control subjects under no social pressure are compared with high and low ATSCI subjects under pressure reveal that high ATSCI subjects are more likely to comply with normative pressures

Do Negative Consumption Experiences Hurt Manufacturers or Retailers? The Influence of Reasoning Style on Consumer Blame Attributions and Purchase Intention

Negative consumption experiences adversely influence consumer perceptions of manufacturers and retailers. The author theorizes and finds that analytical thinkers are more likely than holistic thinkers to attribute the cause of the negative consumption experience to the manufacturer, resulting in lower repurchase intention of the manufacturer brand. In contrast, holistic thinkers are more likely than analytical thinkers to attribute the cause of the negative consumption experience to the retailer, resulting in lower repurchase intention at the retailer. These findings are important to marketing managers at both ends of the marketing supply chain--manufacturers and retailers--who deal with consumers with diverse cultural backgrounds

The fit factor: the role of fit between ads in understanding cross-media synergy

This research investigates the role of fit between campaign ads in generating cross-media effects. Using an ecologically valid design, this article enhances our understanding of cross-media effects in real life. By combining a content analysis of Dutch cross-media campaigns with a secondary data analysis of tracking studies on the same campaigns (n = 900), this research revealed that fit contributed positively to campaign evaluations yet contributed negatively to brand and campaign memory. In conclusion, this research shows that fit is an important factor in understanding cross-media synergy but might have both positive and negative effects