Advertisers are increasingly using comparative advertising to influence product/brand evaluations. Broadly defined, a company is said to be using comparative advertising when the sponsoring brand makes implicit or explicit comparisons with some other identified or unidentified brand at the attribute(s) or overall level. Empirical research examining the process through which comparative advertising impacts brand evaluations is not well understood. The purpose of this research is to examine the process through which comparative advertising influences evaluations. Several social psychology theories such as the cognitive response approach, attribution theory and the elaboration likelihood model of persuasion are considered to develop the research hypotheses. The primary hypothesis advanced was that comparative advertising has a significantly more favorable influence on attribute importance, brand evaluations, confidence in brand evaluations and behavioral intentions than noncomparative advertising. Additionally, the mediating effects of cognitive responses generated as a result of message exposure were also considered. The study was conducted in a laboratory setting using university employees as subjects. A 2 x 2 x 3 full factorial design was used. The three factors were message type (noncomparative, comparative), message content (evaluative, factual), and message sidedness (one-sided, two-sided unrefuted, two-sided refuted). The investigations were carried out using print medium with the context of bank checking accounts. The results from this study supported the hypothesis that comparative messages are superior to noncomparative messages in terms of their impact on evaluation processes. However, with respect to message content and message sidedness there was limited support.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UMASS/oai:scholarworks.umass.edu:dissertations-7922 |
| Date | 01 January 1990 |
| Creators | Ahlawat, Sucheta S |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst |
| Source Sets | University of Massachusetts, Amherst |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Source | Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest |
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