Consumers consistently pursue new beginnings regarding health, financial wellbeing, and personal growth. Conceptual metaphors like the "fresh start" can be powerful tools for reframing problems and motivating behaviors (Coulter and Zaltman 2000; Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Landau, Keefer and Meier 2010; Thibodeau and Boroditsky 2011), and are frequently featured in movies, blogs, strategic marketing communication, and products. However, research has not examined whether fresh starts can indeed help consumers set new goals and improve their performance. This dissertation seeks to explore the role of the fresh start metaphor in consumers' lives. In Chapter 2, I define the fresh start as consumers' pursuit of new beginnings, and develop a reliable scale distinct from related constructs such as optimism, hope, entity theory and psychological closure. I find that consumers who score higher on the fresh start scale focus on the future more optimistically, report higher intentions to set new goals, and increase efforts toward health and financial budgeting. In Chapter 3, I investigate whether actively engaging the metaphor of the fresh start can change consumer outcomes. I find that when participants are prompted to activate a fresh start they expect to perform better on a challenging task (e.g., losing weight or saving money) because it increases their belief that present obstacles will have less hold in the future. I also find that a fresh start translates into performance improvements when participants perform poorly on a task in a personally important domain, and self-efficacy mediates the effect. Overall, results provide strong support for the role of the fresh start as a powerful tool that consumers can use to improve well-being, overcome poor performance, set new goals, and transform for the better.

The two primary objectives for this thesis are (1) to understand the effectiveness of different types of mobile phone based advertisements and (2) to identify if the amount of time users spent viewing an advertisement can be used as a measure of advertising effectiveness. To achieve these objectives, this study first conducted qualitative studies consisting of a focus group with consumers and an interview with a mobile advertising technology provider. Qualitative study results identified the following variables of interest; vividness of the advertisement, product involvement, and consumer goals. Supported by existing literature on advertising, these variables were then used to develop a conceptual model outlining the relationship between the variables and measures of advertising effectiveness. To empirically examine this model, this study conducted a 3x2x4 experiment of high, medium and low advertisement mode vividness, high and low product involvement and four stages of pre-purchase consumer goals. A total of 288 responses were collected from a student sample from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. The dependence relationships outlined in the conceptual model were then analysed using ANCOVA, logistic regression, linear regression, and various other non-parametric analysis techniques. The results of this study suggest that level of advertisement mode vividness and product involvement both exert a strong influence on the effectiveness of the advertisement. However, results on consumer goals suggest that the effectiveness of the advertisement is only affected by whether a consumer goal existed before viewing the advertisement. This study was unable to identify any relationship between the effectiveness of an advertisement and the amount of time users spent viewing an advertisement on a mobile phone.