About AMA

Amna Kirmani and Rui (Juliet) Zhu

Executive Summary
This research demonstrates that certain types of advertisements should not be placed in programming content that makes consumers suspicious of the manipulative intent of corporations, politicians, or the media. Specifically, the studies show that simply reading an article describing how a company's chief executive officer lied about profitability can make people suspicious about ad claims from a different company.

The article examines two factors that affect consumer suspicion of advertisers' manipulative intent: (1) ambiguous ad claims and (2) regulatory focus. Consumers are likely to be suspicious of advertisements that contain ambiguous claims, such as incomplete comparisons that do not specify a referent brand (e.g., "better than the leading brand"). Moreover, consumers under a prevention regulatory focus are more likely to be suspicious of ambiguous claims than are consumers under a promotion focus. Regulatory focus refers to how consumers pursue their goals. Whereas people with a promotion focus perceive their goals as hopes and approach matches to such goals with eagerness, those with a prevention focus perceive the same goals as duties and avoid mismatches to such goals with vigilance. Through a series of experiments, the authors demonstrate that regulatory focus interacts with message cues to affect suspicion of manipulative intent, which in turn affects brand evaluations.

Specifically, Study 1 demonstrates that compared with a promotion regulatory focus, a prevention focus increases vigilance about the advertiser's manipulative intent. Thus, when message claims are ambiguous about manipulative intent, prevention-focused people are likely to give less favorable brand evaluations than are promotion-focused individuals. When message claims are unambiguous, brand evaluations do not differ across regulatory foci. Study 2 shows that the effects across regulatory focus are due to differences in how sensitive the two groups are to manipulative intent. Prevention-focused people have a lower threshold for manipulative intent than do promotion-focused individuals.

The article has implications for ad placement. It suggests that advertisers should not place advertisements in movies or television shows that make corporate fraud salient (e.g., The Smartest Guys in the Room, Dateline, or 60 Minutes segments on the Enron fraud). Thinking about corporate fraud triggers suspicion of advertisements from companies that are not involved in the fraud, especially when such advertisements contain ambiguous elements. In addition, advertisers should be careful in using headlines that might trigger a prevention focus (e.g., a headline for CIT Group Inc. stating, "Help you avoid hazards"); such headlines might make consumers more suspicious of the manipulative intent of ambiguous ad claims.

Biography
Amna Kirmani is Professor of Marketing at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. She received her PhD from Stanford University and has served on the faculty of Duke University, the University of Florida and Southern Methodist University. Her research interests include consumers' inferences of product quality from marketing signals, consumers' use of persuasion knowledge, and branding. Her papers have won the Paul Green Award in Journal of Marketing Research, the Maynard Award in Journal of Marketing, and the Best Paper Award in Journal of Advertising. She serves on the editorial board of Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology, and Journal of Interactive Marketing.

Rui (Juliet) Zhu is Assistant Professor of Marketing in the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia. She received her PhD in Marketing from the University of Minnesota and her BA in economics from University of International Business and Economics in China. Her research interests include consumer information processing and psychology, self-regulation, music effects, design and structural effects of physical environment, and experiential processing.