Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science

Research on consumer cognitive response has focused primarily on the issue of persuasiveness of advertising com munications. Involvement states have been frequently proposed as mediators of cognitive responses. This article proposes extending cognitive responses and their interaction with involvement to the measurement of disconfirmation resulting from a product trial experience which is designed to be inconsistent with prior expectations derived from adver tising exposure. Such expectations are manipulated by vary ing levels of exaggeration in one and two-sided advertisements. High and low involvement with the response task is also introduced, and hypotheses are presented as to the effects of involvement, exaggeration, and two-sided presentations on disconfirmation and cognitive responses.

The findings suggest that exaggeration increases discon firmation and counterargumentation, especially in high in volvement conditions, and that two-sided refutational ads tend to moderate these effects. More broadly, the article sug gests that examination of cognitive responses should be ex tended beyond evaluation of advertising stimuli and should be used to evaluate the post-trial experience.

The study findings suggest that the level of response in volvement (high versus low) and the variability of product class quality (high versus moderate versus low) influence the size of the consumer's choice set. By manipulating product class quality the authors show that as the variability in product class quality increases, consumers reduce the num ber of brands they will consider purchasing (evoked set) and increase the number of brands they won't consider (inept set). They also use the response involvement variable a priori to categorize the (sample) population. The results indicate that, as the variability in product class quality increases, the high response involvement groups form smaller evoked sets and larger inept sets than the low response involvement groups.

This article reports the results of an experimental inves tigation of the influence of a communicator's characteristics on respondent's evaluation of an advertisement when the communicator is in the role of a spokesperson. Specifically, the author assesses the impact of the physical attractiveness, sex and race of a spokesperson, the sex of the respondent and product advertised on respondent's attitude toward the ad vertisement, and respondent's perceptions of the advertised product.

The results presented indicate that the effectiveness of the factors mentioned are dependent on the specific objective of the communication. A main effect of physical attractiveness was noted on a subject's attitude toward the advertisement, on perceptions of product quality and intent to purchase. The sex of the communicator impacted on a subject's perception of product quality and interacted with the race of the com municator to effect the intent to purchase variable. Race was shown to effect the subject's perception of product quality. A main effect of the sex of the subject was noted for the cogni tion variable.

An assessment was made of the reliability and validity of self-report measures of three separate constructs hypothesized to operate in husband and wife decision making for durable goods purchases. In addition to the traditional construct of Influence, Importance, and Participation in the decision were also examined through the use of constant sum scaled responses for both husbands and wives. Following Davis' (1976) admonition to focus on the decision process, the present study conceptualized the purchase decision as consisting of three stages with multiple subdecisions in each stage. The results of a multitrait-multimethod matrix analysis support the use of a constant sum scaling approach to measuring the three constructs. The findings also indicate the existence of two dimensions within the purchase decision processfor the durable goods of automobiles and family room furniture. These dimensions were labeled resource allocation and variant selection decisions. The findings also suggest that importance is a global construct in decision making while in fluence and participation are more purchase situation specific.

The effects of manipulation of appeal types, anonymitylnonanonymity, and the promise/no promise of feedback of research results on response patterns were ex amined using a sales population. The results indicate that the use of these techniques can enhance the response patterns from salespeople. Specifically, the egoistic appeal, the inter action of egoistic appeal with anonymity, and feedback were shown to influence response rate, response speed, and response completeness.

This exploratory study focuses on the use of buying center purchase responsibilities as a basis for industrial market seg mentation. Analysis of buying centers revealed differences between organizations with "overlapping" versus "posi tion-dominant" patterns of purchase responsibility. Hypotheses supporting overlapping versus position- dominant buying centers are discussed, and implications for industrial marketing management are proposed.

The author applies a model based on transaction cost analysis to explain the vertical control selections made by a sample of exporters. The model, which obtains significant support, suggests that an important contingency when decid ing on the desired level of vertical control in a particular in stance, is the ability of the market to limit the opportunistic tendencies of outside intermediaries. In effect, the market's ability to enforce contractual arrangements is often limited. When such enforcement cannot be relied upon, greater con trol represents a necessary alternative.