When Persuasion Goes Undetected: The Case of Comparative Advertising

Abstract

Why does the weight of current empirical evidence indicate little difference in the persuasiveness of comparative and noncomparative advertising? One explanation explored in this research is that the measures commonly used for assessing the persuasive impact of comparative advertising are limited in their ability to capture the unique effects that may arise from this type of advertising. Measures that capture relative impressions of the advertised and comparison brands are found to be far more sensitive in detecting persuasion effects of comparative advertising. Moreover, the appropriateness of different types of relative measures is shown to depend on the correspondence between the encoding frame adopted during ad processing and the measure's response frame.