Although there is much evidence that the presence of a feature advertisement can increase the sales and market share of a product, little is known about how feature ad design characteristics (e.g., size, color, and location of the advertisement) affect the sales outcomes. In addition, no prior research has examined whether and to what extent the amount of visual attention that consumers pay to a feature advertisement affects sales of the featured product. The marketing and visual attention literature predicts that feature advertisements lead to behavioral outcomes through their effect on consumers’ attention. Building on this idea, the authors propose a Bayesian statistical model to study how feature ad characteristics affect sales of the featured products and the mediating role of attention in these relationships. They link data from eye-tracking tests of feature advertisements and sales data from a representative consumer panel, aggregated and matched at the level of the feature advertisement. Attention is measured as the average gaze duration on a feature advertisement. Their approach takes into account various sources of endogeneity in the key variables and overcomes three major challenges in standard mediation analyses: omitted variables, measurement error, and obtaining accurate standard errors of mediated effects for small samples.
The authors find that the gaze duration on a feature advertisement has a positive effect on sales of the featured product above and beyond the mere presence of an advertisement and that attention mediates the effects of several feature ad design characteristics on sales. In addition, they find that the surface size of a feature advertisement is endogenous to gaze duration. Failure to account for this source of endogeneity will lead to biased and inconsistent estimates of the effects of ad design characteristics. This finding highlights the importance of incorporating the mediating role of visual attention when studying the effects of feature ad design characteristics on sales, even if the analyst is not interested in the sales effects of attention itself.
The authors also find that the attention measure used in this study, the average gaze duration to a feature advertisement, is not endogenous to sales. This means that the average gaze duration measure is a valid mediator even when used in a standard mediation model that does not account for endogeneity. This is an important finding and good news for marketing researchers and practitioners who are involved in feature ad design and planning decisions. It suggests that attention tests of feature advertisements are a helpful tool for assessing the directional changes in the sales outcome of different feature ad designs. When the quantitative relationships between visual attention and sales have been well calibrated for specific products and situations, managers can use attention data collected in lab tests on feature advertisements with different designs to compare their relative sales outcomes before actual media placement of the advertisements. This will enable them to significantly improve the efficiency of the feature ad design process and reduce costs of ineffective advertisements.
Biography
Jie Zhang is Associate Professor of Marketing and Harvey Sanders Fellow of Retail Management in the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. She holds a PhD from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University. Her general research interest is in applying econometric and statistical models to study consumers’ purchase behavior and response to various promotion programs and then designing innovative decision support tools for marketers based on these models. She is particularly interested in their applications in the Internet shopping environment. Her recent research projects have focused on online promotion customizations and shopping behavior and various topics that aim at improving decision making for retail management. Her research has won the Procter & Gamble Marketing Innovation Research Award and has been sponsored by the Marketing Science Institute. She has published articles in leading marketing and management journals, such as Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing Research, and Management Science.
Michel Wedel is PepsiCo Professor of Consumer Science in the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. His main research interest is in consumer science: the application of statistical and econometric methods to further the understanding of consumer behavior and to improve marketing decision making. He has won the Hendrik Muller lifetime award for the social and behavioral sciences awarded by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences for “exceptional achievements in the area of the behavioral and social sciences” and has been elected as a foreign correspondent of that academy. He has also won the O’Dell Award for best article published in Journal of Marketing Research and the Gilbert A. Churchill Award for lifetime achievement in marketing research. He has published more than 150 articles in peer-reviewed journals. He is ranked first among all scholars in economics and business in the Netherlands. He has supervised 13 doctoral students. He is an area editor for Marketing Science and an associate editor for Journal of Marketing Research, and he serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Classification, Quantitative Marketing and Economics, and Journal of Marketing. He has also published books on market segmentation, models for marketing decisions, and visual marketing.
Rik Pieters is Professor of Marketing at Tilburg University, the Netherlands, and a member of
TIBER (Tilburg Institute for Behavioral Economic Research) and CentER at that university. He holds a PhD in Psychology from the University of Leiden, the Netherlands. His work is devoted to furthering consumer science and understanding vision.
Journal Marketing Research, Volume 46, Number 5, October 2009
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