Pencil Dude's Notebook

5 ways to get website traffic — ‘without spending a dime’ — from Bob Parsons and the Godaddy Girls: (more…)

I’m sticking with my brand: Loyal customers perceive competitor ads differently.

What does it take for marketers to reach customers who are already loyal to a particular brand? A new study in the Journal of Consumer Research examines brand loyalty and the way it affects perceptions of advertising.

Authors Sekar Raju (Iowa State University), H. Rao Unnava (Ohio State University, and Nicole Votolato Montgomery (College of William and Mary) discovered that consumer brand loyalty heavily influences responses to marketing from competing brands. “Consumers who are more loyal to a brand seem to search and process competitor brand information very differently than consumers who are less loyal to a brand,” write the authors. “When loyalty is high, consumers search for evidence that a competitor brand is not a good brand, contrary to the advertisement information.”

In contrast, less loyal customers look for evidence to confirm that the competitor brand is a good brand. “This search manifests in the identification of similarities between their preferred brand and competing brand, resulting in an overall perception that the two brands are alike.”

In three related studies, researchers compared people who were very loyal to specific brand-name products: Sony music players, Saucony athletic shoes, and Olympus voice recorders. The researchers succeeded in changing the perceptions of low and high-loyalty participants by asking them to shift their focus from dissimilarities to similarities, or vice versa.

“The change in focus from searching for similarities to dissimilarities has implications for marketers. Advertisements that are targeted toward consumers who are loyal to another brand may have to be structured differently,” conclude the authors.

Source: University of Chicago Press Journals

Well, I’m back at my computer — I’ve been away for awhile. Been traveling and did a major move.

Getting sorted out after the move, despite my planning ahead has proven to be challenging.

Fortunately I did plan, so some things went pretty smoothly. And fortunately most of my sites work pretty much on auto-pilot, (as long as I’ve planned ahead) so traffic and sales at those sites just kept on ticking along.

It’s good to be back at the computer though and getting back to work.

COLUMBIA, Mo. -– It’s all fun and games when it comes to the current trend in online advertising. Advergames, online video games used to advertise a product or brand, increasingly are being used by advertisers to attract and engage consumers. In a new study, University of Missouri researchers examined the impact of advergame themes on consumers’ attitudes toward advergames and brands. The study revealed that consumers expressed strong positive relationships toward brands when they played advergames with strong thematic connections to the brands.

In the study, participants played two advergames, both with either high or low thematic connection to the brand. Thematic connection refers to the degree that the object of the advergame relates to the brand’s product or services. For example, the travel company Orbitz designed a game, “Find Your Hotel,” that has a theme related to the company’s travel services. Another Orbitz game, “Paper Football,” does not have a thematic connection to the company’s services.

“While games that related to the brand were not inherently more enjoyable than unrelated games, the transfer of enjoyment from the game to a positive attitude toward the brand was stronger when the game and brand were thematically related,” said Kevin Wise, assistant professor of strategic communication in the MU School of Journalism. “Game enjoyment led to positive attitude toward the brand when a high thematic connection existed between the game and the brand. This was not the case when the participants played games with a low thematic connection.”

According to Wise, previous research has focused on content analysis, effects on children and social policy implications. This is one of only a few studies that examined the effectiveness of specific features of advergames in producing desired results with consumers.

“A great deal of previous research has been devoted to the relationship between attitude towards an ad and attitude towards the brand in traditional media. In this study, we tried to extend that research to the world of online games,” Wise said. “We found that brand-related advergames facilitated the transfer of enjoyment to the brand, compared to unrelated games. Brand-related advergames are not inherently more expensive to produce, so these findings suggest that they might be more effective as a way of developing positive consumer attitudes towards a particular brand.”

The study, “Enjoyment of Advergames and Brand Attitudes: The Impact of Thematic Relevance,” was published in the fall 2008 issue of the Journal of Interactive Advertising. The study was funded by a grant from MU Center for the Digital Globe (CDiG)

Source: MU News

Zurich, Switzerland –– Love a rap artist’s music, and you may develop fond feelings for the products placed in that artist’s rap video. That is essentially the conclusion that a team of investigators came to in an intriguing research article published in this month’s issue of Psychology & Marketing (P&M).

After the release of Busta Rhymes and Puff Daddy’s Pass the Courvoisier Part Two, a rap music featuring conspicuous product placement of Courvoisier cognac, sales of that beverage jumped 20 percent. That phenomenon got a team of researchers and senior author Christian Schemer thinking about how consumers process brand information presented to them in spot advertising versus how consumers process brand-related information when it is presented in the course of programming (such as music videos).

In their P&M article, they describe a series of experiments designed to explore psychological aspects of consumers’ response to brand placement in rap videos.

The researchers concluded that placement of products in programming such as rap videos can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, positive feelings toward the programming can be transferred to the brand. It’s also true that product placement in programming has the benefit of a longer “shelf life” than more traditional advertising. It may also be more globally distributed (at no advertiser expense) and be particularly effective in reaching a targeted demographic.

However, there are potential dangers associated with product placement in programming such as rap videos, not the least of which entails negative feelings aroused by the video being transferred to the brand.

To view the abstract for this article, please click here.

Source: Wiley InterScience