Stefano Puntoni and Nader T. Tavassoli
Executive Summary
This article is the first to examine the influence of the presence of others on advertising memory. The authors present and test a framework to explain one mechanism by which the presence of another person––in the absence of direct interaction––can alter information processing. The framework is based on the premise that the presence of another person raises a concern with the impression that the person may be forming and predicts that this heightened concern will affect the processing of stimuli based on their applicability to social desirability. This research diverges from previous research on social desirability that has examined overt response biases by conceptualizing social desirability as a pervasive motivational determinant of behavior, even if this behavior is purely cognitive and entirely private.
Using reaction times on a lexical decision task, the authors find that words applicable to social desirability are accessed faster when respondents are in the presence of another person than when alone. Moreover, across three experiments, semantic (but not perceptual) memory for words and advertisements applicable to social desirability is greater than that for neutral cues after respondents are exposed to these in the actual or imagined presence of others than when alone. The memory results suggests that social context influences memory for cues with varying applicability to social desirability by increasing consumers' focus on the meaning of cues with high applicability to social desirability but not necessarily affecting consumers' focus on their surface characteristics. Moreover, the effects for reactions times and free recall are moderated by respondents' chronic impression management tendencies (self-monitoring), suggesting that they are, at least in part, determined by motivational factors.
The article has implications for the advertising industry, especially for media planning and pretesting, in which top-of-mind recall is one of the most commonly used measures of advertising effectiveness. In terms of media planning, the findings indicate that campaigns that play on the theme of social desirability are more recallable when viewed in a social context. In terms of pretesting, they suggest that effort should be placed to match pretesting conditions with likely marketplace conditions. In addition, the findings demonstrate that experiments possess social and scientific meaning and therefore provide methodological insight into the threat to external validity posed by a failure to account for the effect of social context in research settings.
Biography
Stefano Puntoni is Assistant Professor of Marketing Management in the RSM Erasmus University, Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He joined Erasmus University in 2005 after receiving a PhD in Marketing from the London Business School. His research focuses on social influences on consumer behavior. His teaching interests are in the areas of brand management and marketing communications.
Nader T. Tavassoli is Professor of Marketing. He joined London Business School in 2002 after spending seven years on the marketing faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management, where he was also the Richard Leghorn Career Development Professor of Entrepreneurship and Director of the eBusiness track. He received his PhD from Columbia University. Professor Tavassoli's research is on brand strategy, marketing communications, and consumer psychology, with a special emphasis on cross-cultural differences in behavior. He is widely published in the marketing and psychology literature streams. His consulting and teaching expertise are in branding, customer orientation, marketing strategy, and global marketing.
Journal of Marketing Research, Vol. XLIV, No. 2, May 2007
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