Executive Summary
A major component of many advertising strategies is to position a product in the minds of the consumer in comparison with the competition. For example, many firms may take a “follow-the-leader” or “copycat” strategy to make comparisons with a competitor easy and more salient; in other cases, a company may choose to differentiate itself completely from existing brands and communicate that “they are not me!” Essentially, many firms want to be able to “stake out” the location at which they will sit on a perceptual map in the consumers’ mind.
To this end, using a feature-based Bayesian statistical model and empirical exploration, the authors assess the degree to which similarity perceptions between two advertisements can be decomposed and explained by a “weighted-and-summed” distance measure, computed on the advertisements’ executional elements, after controlling for familiarity and viewers’ attitudinal responses toward the advertisements. That is, to what degree can firms, or ad agencies, “control” how similarly their advertisements are perceived compared with others by changing the “physical and measurable” components (e.g., number of children) in the advertisement?
The authors obtain empirical findings in two major areas. First, variation in similarity ratings can be explained by the advertisements’ features, a finding of potential importance for advertisement construction. Second, some, but not all, executional elements that have been shown in prior literature to drive recall and persuasion are effective at driving perceptions of similarity. This is of practical importance because managers want their advertisements not only to be liked and remembered but also possibly to be perceived as similar (or dissimilar) to those for other products. In particular, understanding which items drive which outcomes (recall and persuasion or, as studied in this article, similarity) can contribute to a more effective overall marketing strategy.
Biography
David A. Schweidel is a doctoral candidate in the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He received a BA in Mathematics with minors in Economics and Actuarial Mathematics in 2001 and an MA in Statistics in 2004 from the University of Pennsylvania in 2001. His research interests include modeling individual choice behavior, particularly as people’s behavior evolves over time, and customer relationship management applications.
Eric T, Bradlow is currently K.P. Chao Professor, Professor of Marketing and Statistics, and Academic Director of the Wharton Small Business Development Center in the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He earned a BS in Economics from the Wharton School in 1988, an MA in Mathematical Statistics in 1990, and a PhD in Mathematical Statistics in 1994 from Harvard University. He joined the Wharton faculty in 1996. Eric received the MBA Core Curriculum teaching award and Miller-Sherrerd MBA Core Teaching award in 1999, 2000, 2001, and 2002 and the Excellence in Teaching Award in 2003, 2004, and 2005. Eric was recently named a fellow of the American Statistical Association. He is past chair of the American Statistical Association Section on Statistics in Marketing and is a statistical fellow of Bell Labs. He was also named DuPont Corporation’s best young researcher in 1992. His research interests include Bayesian modeling, statistical computing, and developing new methodologies for unique data structures with application to business problems.
Patti Williams is James G. Campbell Jr. Memorial Term Assistant Professor of Marketing in the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. She received a BA in Communication from Stanford University and an MBA and a PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles. Before joining the faculty at Wharton, she was a professor in the Stern School of Business at New York University. Professor Williams’s research focuses primarily on two areas: the impact that emotions have on persuasion and consumer decision making and the nonconscious, or implicit, aspects of consumer behavior. Her research has appeared in Journal of Consumer Research and several psychology journals, among others. In addition, she serves on the editorial review board for Journal of Consumer Research. She was selected as a Marketing Science Institute Young Scholar and has received research funding from Procter & Gamble and the Marketing Science Institute.
J Marketing Research, Volume 43, Number 2, May 2006
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