Further study of want versus commodity advertisements

Abstract

This article presents a summary of further study of a problem reported recently in the J. Appl. Psychol . This problem concerns the relative effectiveness of "want" and "solution" advertisements. Forty advertisements of twenty articles, one "want" and one "solution" for each article, were used in this investigation. The subjects were 108 men and 18 women from a general psychology class. After the subjects had read the advertisements according to instructions, in order to test their memory of the material, they were given a "recognition of paragraphs" test, a "recognition of sentences" test, and a "recall of trade names" test. From the results of the first two tests named it is shown that copy from "want" advertisements was read 39% more than that from "solution" or "commodity" advertisements. The results of the trade names test favor the "want" advertisements by 11%. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)