تکرار تبلیغات و ادراک کیفیت

Nelson [J. Polit. Econ. 78 (1970) 311; J. Polit. Econ. 81 (1974) 729; Nelson P. The economic value of advertising. In: Brozen Y, editor. Advertising and society. New York: New York Univ. Press, 1974. pp. 43–66] has argued that advertising spending is a signal of product quality for experience goods because consumers can rationally infer that high-quality products would advertise more than low-quality products. In this paper, we compare Nelson's view of advertising with marketing views of advertising using ad repetition as a surrogate for ad spending. Our results show limited support for Nelson's theory but substantial support for ad repetition influencing perceived quality through attitude toward the ad.

In a seminal paper nearly 30 years ago, Nelson (1970) proposed a distinction between two types of goods, search goods and experience goods, and offered a new theory of advertising based on that distinction. Search goods were defined as products whose quality consumers can verify before purchasing (e.g., clothing, furniture, and jewelry). Experience goods were defined as products whose quality the consumer cannot determine until after buying and experiencing the product (e.g., foods, books, and detergents). Nelson argued that advertising claims for experience goods are uninformative because consumers cannot verify such claims before purchasing the product. Advertising spending, however, is informative because consumers can rationally infer that products that advertise more are of higher quality than products that advertise less. By contrast, for search goods, advertising claims are informative, and no further information is needed from, or provided by, the spending level. Nelson's view of advertising for experience goods is radically different from “the marketing view.” Whereas Nelson minimizes the importance of the ad itself—for example, it is not even necessary for the firm to advertise as long as it has other ways of “burning money”—the marketing literature emphasizes it (Batra et al., 1996). In marketing, it is taken as a given that ad design and ad claims have significant effects on product perceptions—regardless of the nature of the product. In fact, the work of Hoch and Ha (1986) suggests that, if anything, advertising claims might be even more effective in shaping perceptions for experience goods because the experience itself is likely to be ambiguous. Marketing textbooks are replete with examples of how the same physical product (e.g., 7-Up) has been “positioned” in different ways through different ad campaigns.

In the conventional view of advertising, as described in marketing textbooks, the effectiveness of advertising is a function of its content (the message), execution (how the ad conveys the message), and frequency (how often a consumer sees the ad) Kotler, 1997 and Batra et al., 1996. The advertising spending level enters the picture only in service of these three factors. If a company does not spend enough on advertising, then its content might be off-base, or the ads might be poorly executed, or the frequency might be inadequate. Nelson, 1970, Nelson, 1974a and Nelson, 1974b theory offers a radically different view. It argues that how advertising works depend on whether the product is a search good or an experience good and that the marketing view applies only to search goods. For experience goods, the only thing that matters is the advertising spending level—or, for that matter, any “wasteful” spending—not content, execution, or frequency. This paper offers evidence in support of the marketing view. Our experiments show that it matters how advertising spending information is communicated to subjects. Subjects respond more to advertising repetition—in the sense of changing their perceived quality judgments—when they are actually exposed to advertising than when the advertising frequency data are provided to them as an abstract number. On the other hand, it does not seem to make much difference whether the product being advertised is a search good or an experience good.