The more the merrier: dealing with a multitude of advertising effects

This is the fourth special issue presenting papers from the International Conference on Research in Advertising (ICORIA). It contains a selection of six papers from the 2018 ICORIA presentations that were delivered during the conference in Valencia, Spain.

Just as the presentations at the conference, the papers in this issue cover a wide range of topics, methods, and approaches. This year’s papers study a wide variety of effects that advertising can have, ranging from traditional advertising effectiveness measures such as attention and attitudes (Daume and Hüttl-Maack 2020; Maslowska, Segijn, Vakeel, and Viswanathan 2020; Schouten, Janssen, and Verspaget 2020) to measures that became important with the shift towards online advertising, such as engagement and information disclosure (Levy and Gvili 2020; Youn and Shin 2020), but also including less studied effects such as a company’s employee job satisfaction (Schaefer, Terlutter, and Diehl 2020).

The number of advertising effects that are studied in our area of research has increased considerably over the years, indicating a broadening of advertising researchers’ interests, topics, and perspectives and their wish to stay relevant and up-to-date. At the same time, this multitude of effects pose challenges to knowledge progress in our field. Findings from studies using different effect measures are less comparable across studies and thus hinder knowledge accumulation, generalization, or differentiation (Cole 1983). How can advertising researchers and practitioners successfully deal with the increasing number and variety of advertising effects?

Intended and unintended advertising effects and their relationships

In 2016, Dahlén and Rosengren developed a new definition of advertising and explained what this new definition needs to consider in comparison to prior definition attempts (Dahlén and Rosengren 2016). One important consideration is what they call the “extended effects dynamic”: while prior definitions and research have focussed on persuasive and individual consumer effects of advertising (i.e., “traditional effects” such as brand and company related economic effects, brand reactions, and ad reactions), they neglected that advertising also has effects beyond these traditional ones. These extended effects include, for instance, social effects, such as perceptions of the self and of others (e.g., stereotypes), as well as the value of advertising to consumers (e.g., entertainment). By ignoring extended effects, advertising researchers run the risk of mis-calculating and mis-interpreting the effects they are interested in, namely effects that benefit the advertised brand.

Brand benefiting and harming effects

Extended effects are sometimes called “unintended”, implying that advertiser intentions are focussed on effects that benefit the brand, while they have no intention to cause other effects or are not interested in the non-intended target groups of people who show responses to the ad. Nevertheless, these unintended effects occur and they can affect the brand, too. The effects can benefit or harm the brand. For instance, advertisers apply humour in advertising with the intention to increase ad liking, which, in turn, increases liking of the brand, as suggested by an affect-transfer mechanism. At the same time, humour makes people laugh, and enhances personal well-being, and boost consumers’ health (Martin 2010). Similarly, Defever, Pandelaere, and Roe (2011) find that consumers who are exposed to advertising featuring benevolence are more likely to donate to an unrelated cause. These effects—although not intended by advertisers—can benefit a brand, as well-being and health increases approach-related behaviour of consumers.

On the other hand, the example of stereotyping in campaigns and media shows that traditional and conservative depictions of women or minority groups in society can lead to negative social attitudes (Schemer 2012), thereby triggering governmental actions that regulate media content, which—in the case of advertising—can have negative effects for the brand. Advertising can also lead to responses from people who do not belong to the target group advertisers had in mind, hence, to unintended effects. Research on ethnic minority advertising has often shown that non-target consumers of the majority group react more negatively towards an ad than the target groups (Aaker, Brumbaugh, and Grier 2000; Grier and Brumbaugh 1999), which can lead to negative word-of-mouth and harm the brand.

Relationships between intended and unintended effects

By investigating single or few advertising effect measures we risk neglecting the relationship between different effects and thus provide a wrong impression of the various effects advertising can have. The study by Schaefer, Terlutter, and Diehl (2020) in this special issue shows that advertising has (possibly unintended, but definitely extended) effects on the employees of a company that lead to job satisfaction. Employee satisfaction increases service quality and leads to positive consumer response (Brown and Lam 2008). As such, the overall effect of advertising on consumer responses is due to both intended and unintended processes and effects. While we might be able to isolate the intended effects in experiments, any survey data that do not consider these different paths might lead to misinterpretation of results. For instance, the overall effect of advertising on consumer response in the above example might be misinterpreted as a direct effect, although part of this effect works via employee reactions. In the case of suppression effects (Zhao, Lynch, and Chen 2010), we might even assume non-existing effects, even if positive and negative effects are working together (see above example of target and non-target market effects) and the knowledge about the differential effects could help advertisers to avoid the negative effect, thus strengthening the overall effect.

Implications for researchers

As mentioned above, the extension of the range of effects can be beneficial, but might also hinder knowledge development in our area. What should researchers know about advertising effects and what can they do in order to increase the benefits and to avoid the perils of a multitude of advertising effect measures?

First, if possible and appropriate, researchers should include some traditional advertising effects measures (e.g., brand attitude, ad attitude, and purchase intention) for the sake of comparison with the findings in the extant literature. By comparing effects assessed by traditional advertising effect variables, researchers can estimate, evaluate, and compare the effectiveness of different advertising tools across different media and different intended outcomes.

Second, researchers need to keep in mind that advertising has not only intentional effects that benefit the brand, but can have unintended effects that are either benefiting or harming the brand. If appropriate, they can include effect variables that assess such unintended effects. Even if advertising researchers usually gather data among the target group of an ad, including non-target consumers might provide new insights and be relevant if the non-target consumers show responses to an ad that can weaken or strengthen the effects on the target group. In any case, it is mandatory to model, hypothesize, and investigate the relationship between the different outcome variables.

Third, the advertising community needs to take a step back and to decide whether we need many different effect measures and, if not, which ones we should focus on. There seems to be a weak consensus among researchers on how to measure the same advertising effect construct and the variety of measurements indicates that some of the constructs overlap and might not show sufficient discriminant validity, thus questioning whether we really need them (Bergkvist and Langner 2019).

Finally, while there are several theories that connect different advertising effect measures (e.g., hierarchy of effects, dual-mediation model) an overarching theory of advertising effects that includes intended and unintended effects remains elusive. A challenging, but worthwhile task for researchers would be to develop such a theoretical framework that can be applied to different types of advertising across different media and in different contexts.

Papers in this issue

Of the papers submitted and presented at ICORIA in Valencia, those with the highest reviewer scores were selected for this issue. The authors were invited to submit reworked and extended versions of their conference submissions to the International Journal of Advertising. Ten papers underwent the blind review process, of which six were eventually selected for inclusion in the special issue, following successful revisions.

The paper by Schaefer, Terlutter, and Diehl looks at the influence of corporate social responsibility advertising on the company’s employees. They find that cause-company fit is the most important factor for employee evaluation, followed by message credibility and ad liking. The employees’ evaluation of corporate social responsibility advertising influences job satisfaction, organizational pride, and word-of-mouth—all of them unintended outcomes of advertising.

Youn and Shin study the responses of adolescents to social media newsfeed advertising on Facebook. They find that the adolescents’ assessments of risks and benefits are linked to their scepticism towards social media newsfeed advertising, which in turn determines whether they disclose information on Facebook (as the ultimate effect measure in their model).

Levy and Gvili investigate how and why consumers engage in price negotiations that are provided by numerous online sellers. They show that consumers’ engagement in price negotiation depends on whether consumers are from more collectivistic cultures and how much they are involved in the buying process and that this influence is strengthened when electronic word-of-mouth of others’ experience with price negotiations is shared.

Schouten, Janssen, and Verspaget investigate the advertising effectiveness of influencer endorsement as compared to traditional celebrity endorsement. The authors find added value (as assessed by traditional advertising effects measures of ad attitude, brand attitude, and purchase intention) of influencers over celebrity endorsers and explain this by consumers’ higher identification with and more trust towards influencers.

Maslowska, Segijn, Vakeel, and Viswanathan use eye tracking to investigate attention (i.e., a traditional advertising effects measure) of consumers to product pages that provide online reviews. They find that consumers pay attention to review text and reviewer information next to product-related information.

Daume and Hüttl-Maack explore triggers in advertising that evoke curiosity and the processes that are elicited by curiosity. They find that only some commonly used triggers do evoke curiosity and that the advertising effectiveness (as assessed by product attitudes) can be explained by expectation-driven evaluation and process-induced emotions.

We wish to thank the authors who submitted manuscripts for publication consideration and the reviewers who contributed their expertise and valuable time to improve the submissions. We also thank Ray Taylor for asking us to edit this special issue and for his trust and encouragement throughout the process.

Martin Eisend
European University Viadrina, Germany
[email protected]
Sara Rosengren
Stockholm School of Economics, Sweden

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).