The Typicality and Accessibility of Consumer Attitudes Toward Television Advertising: Implications for the Measurement of Attitudes Toward Advertising in General

Abstract

Despite the wide array of contemporary advertising formats and media, television advertising remains the most dominant form to which typical consumers are exposed. Research on attitudes toward advertising in general (Att-AiG) implicitly assumes that the Att-AiG measure represents advertising as a whole. A major finding of the current research is that consumers tend to have a mental representation, or exemplar, of the most typical type of advertising—television advertising—when they report their Att-AiG. Therefore, in reality, Att-AiG primarily reflects attitudes toward television advertising. In addition, the results of our experiments indicate that television ad exemplars generate temporal changes in consumers’ reported Att-AiG and attitudes toward television advertising. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Acknowledgments

Hyun Seung Jin (PhD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is an associate professor of marketing in the Henry W. Bloch School of Management, University of Missouri at Kansas City and an international scholar, College of Politics and Economics, Kyung Hee University, Seoul, Korea.

Richard J. Lutz (PhD, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign) is the J. C. Penney professor of marketing in the Warrington College of Business Administration, University of Florida.