Openness initiative for reviewers - an editorial discussion

One of my former mentors, Gert Storms, a KU Leuven professor in psycholinguistics, sent me this information. Caring about scientific scrutiny, he committed to the Peer Reviewers' Openness Initiative. Following up on that commitment, he recently asked for the data pertaining to a manuscript he was asked to review for the APA's Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory & Cognition. This resulted in a discussion with the journal's editor, Robert Greene. Greene raised issues against data openness prior to the manuscript being accepted and I understand we need to be careful in this process. However, this is covered within the openness initiative. Please find below the editor's response and Gert Storms' reaction to this.

The bottomline is that the editor asks Gert to resign from the editorial board because of the fundamental disagreement. I find it astonishing that a journal is so rigidly opposed to a measure that should in the end increase/restore the self-correcting nature of science and the quality of its own publication. Comments are open for your perspective ...

Science first, communication second. A prequel to the Food and Brand Lab episode

The Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University, led by Brian Wansink (@BrianWansink) caused quite some academic turmoil these recent weeks. This contrasts sharply with the media turmoil usually generated by this lab's research. A series of academic social media posts and a critical article target the lab's inferior methodology and old school approach to rendering null-effects into (a set of) publishable papers. In this post, I want to give my account of a previous similar situation that I had with the same lab in 2012. I think the take-home-messages of this post are the following. First, I want to claim that the recent controversy fits within a longer tradition that pertains to this lab (but maybe also a large part of their discipline) and this just shows that a science revolution for reproducible findings is not a matter of a few years. Second, I do think that given previous criticism on their work, it is astonishing that it has not improved to some extent. Researchers should be more responsive to how the field reacts to their work. Third, the case seems to demonstrate a troublesome trend where labs and universities tend to invest more in PR than in research methodology and ethics. Although I am an enthusiast of science communication, we should not neglect the order in these words: science-communication. "Science first, communication second"

Thanks to @therealdonaldtrump this ad became a political statement

Budweiser's 2017 Superbowl ad tells the tale of how a German immigrant (Adolphus Busch) struggled into New Orleans, but then lived his dream when he partnered with Eberhard Anheuser to start brewing Budweiser. (See also the Wikipedia history of Anheuser-Busch)

Of course, given Donald Trump's so-called #muslimban just a few days old, the internet has welcomed the Budweiser commercial as a political statement against closed borders and in favor of the true industrious potential of immigrants that made America great (pun intended).

Now, the truth probably is just opposite to that. Most likely, it is Donald Trump's Executive Order that turned this ad into a political statement. See also the comment in this AdAge article. 

What's more, there seems to be a trend in recent ads from the Anheuser-Busch Inbev family to focus on these historic roots, with a striking similarity between ads to touch upon nostalgia, authenticity, and a claim for decades of expertise.

See for instance these examples:

De keerzijde van social proof als overtuigingstechniek: De Samsung Bridge of Life

This Dutch blog post appeared earlier as an article of mine in Tijdschrift voor Marketing (July 2015). See marketingonline.nl

The Bridge of Life Strategic Blindness.

Sommige strategische overtuigingstechnieken zijn goed ingeburgerd bij reclamemakers. Het is dan ook ontstellend dat diezelfde makers ze niet opmerken als ze ook binnensluipen in een campagne en zo het campagneresultaat tegenwerken. Dit stuk bespreekt hoe social proof werkt en hoe het ook vaak binnensluipt in goed bedoelde campagnes die onwenselijk gedrag proberen tegen te gaan.

Samsung's Bridge Of Life (Source: odt.co.nz)

Zomertijd betekent voor heel wat reclamemakers weer even op adem komen na de hoogmis van de creativiteit eind juni in Cannes. Tal van prijzen zijn er weer verdeeld voor allerlei reclames en andere vormen van marketingcommunicatie. Sommigen kunnen mooi pronken met een leeuw, anderen bezinnen zich of bestuderen nog enkele van die winnende cases. Nog anderen denken “ach, leuk wel die campagnes, maar of het echt werkt…?”. Die spanning tussen creativiteit en effectiviteit maakt al decennia deel uit van het circus. En inderdaad reclame die prijzen wint, hoeft niet noodzakelijk beter te werken. Mensen schijnen zulke reclame wel beter te onthouden, maar aankoopintenties of zelfs attitudes ten aanzien van het merk blijken er niet echt beter mee geholpen te worden dan via gewone reclame die niet in de prijzen viel (Till & Baack, 2005).

Empty pledges on food websites targeting children. A persuasive mark study.

Food manufacturers worldwide have typically adopted self-regulation when it concerns their targeting of children. In the EU, this resulted in the EU pledge that has seen some changes and more strict regulations in recent years. These more recent versions also include websites. The EU pledge members also monitor their compliance and this is a supposedly independent study. The results of that monitoring study are summarized as " a high level of member companies’ compliance with their commitments, as well as a significant change in the balance of food advertising to children in the EU towards options that meet common nutrition criteria" (p. 19). Of course, many of these producers typically have lean websites simply listing their catalogue, without a lot of marketing added.

Sample website from a corporate perspective. Little marketing involved

We also did a study to evaluate existing food websites targeting children. Rather than starting with the food producers, we started from the websites that are advertised to children (on food packages that often refer to campaign websites, online games etc.). In a study focusing on Belgium and the Netherlands, our results were much less rosy.
Marketing features were used on each website. Of all the foods these websites advertised, the vast majority (i.e. 88.5%) were unhealthy. A lot of the websites did actually not directly relate to the pledge members although these members represent a majority of food production. However, and this might be most unexpected, pledge members did not stand out with less marketed websites or websites advertising healthier food.

Sample website from a child's consumer perspective: a marketed advergame

More info on the article (International Journal of Health Promotion and Education) here and a full read here

The drama in programmatic online advertising

In times of adversity, online advertising routines fail. Drastically

The above example of an inappropriate display ad is just one in a range of similar advertising anomalies following the crash of Germanwings flight 4U9525 in March 2015. In the hours and days after such events, newspapers witness an increased online traffic to their websites and reports about the disasters in particular. Unfortunately, such reports are often accompanied by inappropriate advertising. Similarly, users of social media often encounter those ads at those times. Conversations on social media about such inappropriate ads often blame either the websites (i.e., news outlets) or the advertisers. But whose fault is it anyway? How should we understand this? And most important, how should different stakeholders within the online advertising business prepare themselves to avoid such mistakes in the future?

Happy Birthday, New Coke (°March 23, 1985)

Tuesday April 23rd of 1985 the Coca-Cola Company launched New Coke. This still remains one of the major cases in the marketing literature. It often ranks first in all-time lists of marketing fails (such as on marketwired, or in Matt Haig's book Brand Failures). Apart from the obvious failure (for the short version, see below; for the longer version, see Wikipedia), I think it is also a good demonstration of the intangible part of brand value, which I will explain below.

How credibility spoiled this mini-lecture on statistics

In a recent reply to one of our commentaries (Smits et al., 2015), Domenic Cicchetti gave an interesting mini-lecture on effect sizes, power, and sample sizes. You'll find it here. Though interesting in itself, it is a pity that the full scope of his contribution will largely remain unnoticed given a series of credibility issues with the text itself and his position as the "statistics editor" of Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. Given that some of my recent research deals with the credibility of online word-of-mouth communication, and because I feel a bit misunderstood as the author of two earlier commentaries to this journal, I will elaborate these credibility issues.

A science preregistration revolution? Not yet.

Within a short span of only 24 hours or so, I received two opposing types of news concerning preregistered science. Its basic idea is that with good preregistration of researchers' intents, science would be more objective by reducing researcher degrees of freedom (e.g., HARKing: Hypothesising After Results are Known; p-hacking: using different analyses, data, variables until the hypothesized effect is found).

• Yesterday, May 19 2014, the journal Social Psychology published an issue stacked with preregistered replication studies. Not all of these replications were (fully) successful, including our own attempt to replicate the idea that a single exposure to music and an object would transfer your attitude about the music to that object (i.e., Gorn’s 1982 concept of single exposure musical conditioning). If you want to read more about this issue and the preregistration idea in (social) psychology, I would suggest Chris Chambers’ blog in the Guardian. For a more critical voice, John Bohannon expressed the idea (or fear) that preregistration relates to academic bullying.

Though I participated in the preregistration replication effort for Social Psychology I am still in doubt about the exact status of preregistration. I believe it is a good and even necessary tool for honest replication attempts. I am not sure whether we should use it for all of our research, as long as we are sure to refrain from HARKing our exploratory analyses. In any case, I think we should move on in honest reporting. Preregistration will only foster scientific integrity if we link it with specific reporting guidelines. Sure, a researcher can also do exploratory analyses that were not preregistered. But we should not conceal them with persuasive wording suggesting that all was planned (cf. HARKing, p-hacking)

"Preregistration will only foster scientific integrity if we link it with specific reporting guidelines"

Sadly, this is not an opinion everybody shares…

• The Lancet finally gave me an editorial decision for the Letter I submitted, addressing precisely the lack of good preregistration and the persuasive framing used by authors to cover up their HARKing. See an earlier blogpost for the (astonishing) details of this. Lancet decided not to publish the submitted commentary. Of course I can understand that all kinds of editorial choices have to be made, but I did not receive a true explanation for the rejection. I sure hope they do acknowledge the seriousness of the issue I tried to address.  

Above, I already talked about HARKing and p-hacking as a serious threat to science integrity. For the non-informed: compare them to a sports game where the rules change. Claiming a soccer victory not because you scored more goals but because you had higher ball possession percentages increases your degrees of freedom to a non-acceptable extent. Your degrees of freedom are limited meaning that when one team wins the game, we understand that this could be due to different facts but at least their is something common to all wins, namely scoring more goals. In (empirical, quantitative) science, an implicit set of (bad) rules has long been dominating "the game". Problem is that science does not pretend to be a mere game. So we should have good rules on interpretation of findings. The problem with ill-executed preregistration of research is that researchers can start pretending to follow the rule book while, in fact, they don't.

That is a serious threat to the preregistration idea – as demonstrated in the Morrison article that I discussed in that commentary that was rejected by Lancet. Such ill-suited practice conceals the researcher degrees of freedom and concealing is worse than not caring about it, I believe.

Submitted, but rejected commentary

References for the commentary:

1 Morrison AP, Turkington D, Pyle M, Spencer H, Brabban A, Dunn G, Christodoulides T, Dudley R, Chapman N, Callcott P, Grace T, Lumley V, Drage L, Tully S, Irving K, Cummings A, Byrne R, Davies LM, Hutton P. Cognitive therapy for people with schizofrenia spectrum disorders not taking antipsychotic drugs: a single-blind randomised controlled trial. Lancet 2014 

2 http://www.controlled-trials.com/ISRCTN29607432/morrison

3 Morrison AP, Wardle M, Hutton P, Davies L, Dunn G, Brabban A, Byrne R, Drage L, Spencer H, Turkington D. Assessing Cognitive Therapy Instead Of Neuroleptics: Rationale, study design and sample characteristics of the ACTION trial. Psychosis 2013; 5(1): 82-92.

4 Schulz KF, Altman DG, Moher D. Protocols, probity, and publication. Lancet 2009; 373: 1524.

5 Glasziou P, Altman DG, Bossuyt P, Boutron I, Clarke M, Julious S, Michie S, Moher D, Wager E. reducing waste from incomplete or unusable reports of biomedical research. Lancet 2014; 383: 267-76.

The pitfalls of pre-registration: The Morrison et al CBT paper

There has been quite a fuss about the recently published (online prepublication) Lancet paper on unmedicated cognitive therapy for schizophrenia patients (see below for a reading list of posts about the study). This paper reports on a longitudinal (9 to 18 months) follow-up study of a treatment group and a control group and its basic claim is that the cognitive therapy treatment group fares better than the control group. Though I contributed to a letter to the editor on a study in the same domain that had tremendous reporting flaws, this research is well outside of my discipline. Still, the criticism on the Lancet paper sparkled my interest in it and even for an outsider, there are strange things going on with said manuscript. In this post I will focus on the peculiar timeline of things that shows one of the greatest pitfalls of scientific pre-registration. Though I am greatly in favor of preregistration for a lot of studies, I do think that the mass application of preregistration might lead to new problems. One evident problem is that merely refering to a preregistered study protocol does not imply that the protocol was sensible or that the researchers actually followed it.

The summary
It took quite some investigative academic journalism, I think, but the summary of the study's timeline is presented below. Plain grey timeline moments are based on assumptions following the different pieces of evidence that are available; those with a colored border are based on one of the four public sources.

Timeline - click to enlarge

Facebook's Whatsapp deal might all be about usability

OK, so Facebook bought Whatsapp for an incredible amount of money. Two reasons have been hypothesized as to the why of that deal: money or data.

Money? The figures do not add. With 450 billion of users paying 1 dollar per year, you're having a very long term goal or sky-high ambitions of increasing the user base.
Data? Sure there is a lot of data involved in Whatsapp. But, seriously, 35$ per user for additional data to use and sell to advertisers? That is a lot of money. Facebook already has a lot of data. They could better spend that money on an army of statisticians and save the other 18.9 billion for another deal.

So, what could be a reason? Usability or, in other words, the attractiveness of Facebook as a sub-internet. Due to its own succes, Facebook has become a massive network crowded with information. The expansion of the social medium called Facebook is gradually reaching a point where you can say that is has become an entire subsystem much like how http once was only a part of "the internet" (next to usenet, FTP, e-mail) but than gradually became a pars pro toto. This is all fine if you are looking at the business figures, but it has a serious drawback for the end user. The stream of information is now so immense that Facebook has to ration the timeline (well, they make money out of it as well, of course, with payed distribution of updates) and that many users finds themselves overwhelmed. This decreases the attractivity for users to spend time on Facebook and it partly explains the unfollowing of friends.

Whatsapp is a perfect solution for that. Integrating it in Facebook will install a sublayer that contains only proximal facebook friends. Indeed, your average contact list on Whatsapp will likely be much smaller than the number of Facebook Friends. It is your closer social inner circle.

Now, imagine a mobile Facebook app layout where Whatsapp is a card within the app. It will contain short status updates of your proximal inner circle. You'll be very interested in that part of the app and engaging a lot with it. Around that info will be your more distant Facebook circle, possibly with brand related posts and Facebook ads for monetization. And you can even imagine regular adds around that one as a third circle. Building the platform as such will ensure a continued interest in the use  of Facebook as a whole, due to the interest in proximal circle of contacts. There are two assumptions here. First, Facebook should try to be the best alternative for both the Whatsapp sub-app and for the overall network experience. Second, people should still be willing to buy smartphones the size of a 7" tablet because a card can only be fitted within an app on such a screen size or larger.
If the above is the way Facebook will integrate Whatsapp, than it is actually a very smart move by Facebook to build there own Google+ based on actual consumer uses. Google+ already has the functionality of different circles, it is closely linked with sharing of pictures and videos (cf. the recent Youtube integration) and it has its messaging/calling application with hangouts. The major drawback of Google+ is that Google built a very strong communication/social platform without consumer usage. I think, Facebook is moving to a very similar platform, but are buying the consumer usage and then make it a platform.

Don't get all psychotic on this paper: Had I (or we) Been A Reviewer (HIBAR)

Academic publishing sometimes displays a strange parallel with advertising. There's the celebrity endorsement by reknown authors, a credibility inference evoked by the academic journal and the assumed thorough peer review, and the sales talk in the paper's abstract.

Original article with some marketing claims added

As a researcher, we should of course know to read beyond that abstract, but a recent Twitter discussion pointed me towards a paper that has a very blatant discrepancy between its sales talk and the article's actual core. The paper appeared to be hard to understand due to a substandard use of statistics and equally bad reporting of the study's methods. This resulted in a "letter-to-the editor" written by Daniel Lakens (@lakens), Stuart Ritchie (@StuartJRitchie) and Keith Laws (@Keith_Laws). The story behind that Letter-to-the-Editor is interesting in its own sake? Be sure to read about it on Daniel's blog.

Below, you'll find a summary of our most important issues with the original paper and a list of other issues that were not included in the letter to the editor. I guess that for many students (irrespective of their field of interest) it would be a good excercise to go through the paper and find at least some of these errors themselves. Indeed, as I already said in the Twitter discussion, the paper would not pass as a Master's thesis (at least, I hope so). This, of course is troublesome with regard to the paper itself, but also concerning the review process that should be able to reject such a write-up.

Shame on the authors, reviewers and editor for sloppy reporting of data. http://t.co/9n2JXJLrV4 HT @Keith_Laws Wouldn't pass as a MA thesis
— Tim Smits (@TimSmitsTim) January 14, 2014

"A/B testing"? That's just slang for "experimental research".

A/B testing originated in advertising as a way to tell which of two types of communications (like two versions of an advertisement) where most effective in driving sales. Since the seminal book by Hopkins on "Scientific Advertising" (1923), the technique has been used in retail as well (e.g. in deciding on effective store design) and most recently in the design of websites. It is with regard to the latter that the term has rapidly gained even more attention and many (mostly) commercial websites now regularly do A/B testing to test certain design options (e.g. should one use the words "Buy Now" or "Order" for the check-out box). Some refer to such a website design test with "split test" because the test actually splits the visitors of the website in different groups, each seeing a different version of the website, and monitors key performance indicators such as check-outs, likes, or clicks.

Why is this just the same as experimental research? The gist of A/B testing is that you manipulate at least one aspect (e.g., call-to-action, color, piece of text, positioning, ...) of your website. Experimental research would say that aspect is your independent variable. To do so, you have to design at least two versions of that website, each having a different value on the design variable you want to test (e.g., "buy now" vs "order" call-to-action). Each instance of the website could be called a condition. You then randomize the visitors to the website such that you can observe the visitors' behavior in each. This observation is what one would label the dependent measure as one thinks its value will at least partly depend on the value of the manipulated design variable. In sum, this is the description of the most basic experiment (and of the majority of A/B tests).

You see, the basics for the two are the same. They even share a bit of history. Though experimental research is older than A/B testing is, the first landmark publication is from the same era as Hopkins' book: Fisher's "The Arrangement of Field Experiments" dates back to 1926. Despite that similarity, I do believe that current A/B testing has not yet benefitted from the long tradition and theoretical advancements academics have made since then. Experimentation has been a core research method in agriculture, biomedicine, psychology, communication, etc. This resulted in crucial insights in the design, execution, measurement, and analysis of experiments. If these advances are being applied in A/B testing than they are surely not wildly shared.
(I will follow up on this post with one or more posts on specific experimentation insights that could be worthwhile from an A/B testing perspective)

Why does the above actually matter?
For students it implies that there might be a lot of transferable skills hiding in your courses. Try to understand experimental research, its subtleties, and the creativity involved with it. You might find it even more relevant after graduation when confronted with your own instance of A/B testing whatever content you will be producing professionally. For testers it implies that tests could benefit a lot from the extensive academic tradition of experimental research.

(Disclaimer: A great post by @peeplaja inspired me for this post. Thanks to @ElienDJ for tweeting about that post).

Wathelet als strateeg van BIVV: choqueren of blokkeren?

[Dutch blogpost in reaction to a newspaper article in which the new Belgian road safety campaign's strategy was discussed]

Vrijdag 13 september. De dag kon niet beter gekozen worden om het over verkeersongevallen te hebben, al ging het in de nieuwsberichten niet om ongevallen door brute pech. De manier waarop Wathelet samen met het Belgisch Instituut voor VerkeersVeiligheid hardleerse bestuurders willen overtuigen, staat in De Standaard te lezen. In het artikel "Nieuwe campagnes moeten choqueren" kan je enkele merkwaardige zaken lezen. Ten eerste lijkt het daar alsof Staatssecretaris Melchior Wathelet zelf de nieuwe strategie bepaalt. Ten tweede staat er geen nuance in over hoe men gaat choqueren, terwijl dat toch belangrijk is.

Reden genoeg voor collega Karolien Poels van Universiteit Antwerpen en mezelf om onderstaande reactie te schrijven. We stuurden ze ook in naar De Standaard, maar daar kregen we geen reactie.

Portion cues in food packaging: Implicit seduction

Ever wondered about the adequate portion size of a glass of soda or juice? A bowl of cereals? Or spreads for your sandwich? Maybe you do think about this from time to time, maybe you don't. Chances are, however, that cues around you have implicitly seduced you (they "nudged" you) to have a certain portion size because they set anchors on which you rely to make your own choices. One such cue could be provided by social comparison: you tend to derive information from what others do. For instance, you'll take a bit more than a smaller person or somebody you know to be dieting. These are quite valid cues. But we are also surrounded by biased cues on food packaging. Next time you open the fridge or you're sitting at the breakfast table, you better take a good look and then think about this post.

brief aan de rectorskandidaten van de KU Leuven omtrent wetenschappelijke integriteit

English Summary: This is an open letter to the four electable chancellors of Leuven University in the 2013 elections. It deals with specific questions about the candidates position regarding scientific integrity issues. It is written by a group of academics employed by Leuven University and signed by an even larger group of Leuven University researchers. 

Endorsement strategies: don't select the obvious

I wrote a guest blog for the Dutch organisation SWOCC, that bridges fundamental research and practitioners on the topic of brands and communication. They regularly publish posts that discuss academic research from an applied angle. What is the practical significance of the reported findings?
In this series, I summarized the findings of the paper by Fredrik Thörn on celebrity endorsement. In this paper, Thörn discusses a study demonstrating the persuasive superiority of a slight mismatch between the celebrity and the brand. Contrary to common logic, many practices, and some much cited theories, others already demonstrated that perfect congruity between celebrity and brand is outperformed by ads where there is still a good but more moderate congruity. Prior studies demonstrated this with regard to tier I brands, boiling down to a guideline where market leaders should use mildly congruent endorsers and new or unknown brands should use congruent endorsers. But what about all brands in between? Thörn demonstrated that also for such brands the expected persuasive impact is higher for moderately congruent endorsements.

The SWOCC blogpost can be found here [In Dutch]

Cashing in on confessions: The Lance interview

Today and tomorrow, the Oprah Winfrey Network will broadcast Oprah's interview with Lance Armstrong. The much hyped and anticipated interview will generate a massive amount of viewers, not only in the US but also worldwide.What an advertising opportunity.
The reach of the interview will surely surpass the reach of the big yearly advertising show called the Super Bowl. On the other hand, Oprah's interview will not result in a useful reach for every advertiser. Not every brand is known worldwide or uses the same brand name, logo and positioning strategy in each country. Another downside is that in contrast to the Super Bowl, advertisers had little time to plan their ads since Oprah did not announce it months before. Still, it seems as if most ad spots have been sold at premium prices (see e.g. Huffington Post).

A journalist asked me to estimate the total ad revenue of this two-part interview. Here is my conservative estimate:
- The inverview will total more than two hours (There is a 1.5 hour show today and another one tomorrow that will at least take 1 hour I guess). Oprah said she did not want to cut the material to a one hour interview because it was too rich (pun added and intended...)
- Assume, conservatively, that there will be 15 minutes of ads per hour, which equals 30 ads in the typical 30 second format.
- Now for the biggest assumption: how much does one ad cost? Super Bowl ads go for about $ 3million each. The most expensive ads in a regular US show are those for Sunday Night Football at an estimated $545,142 (source Adage.com). Given the problems mentioned earlier (short notice to produce targeted ads; possibly not a useful reach worldwide), OWN will not be able to charge at Super Bowl prices. On the other hand, OWN would be stupid to sell at the mere price of sports program (no personal depreciation on my part but the Lance confessions have a much broader audience). If we conservatively assume $750,000 as the minimum price for an ad in Oprah's Next Chapter interview of Lance (probably a serious underestimation)...

... than the total ad revenue should be at least 2,5 x 30 x $.75 million = ~ $56 million.

That is not bad for a network that reports $329 million as their quarterly ad income one year ago (source). And of course, the interview will also generate other income due to it being sold to other stations worldwide. And, in the mid to long term, OWN surely hopes the interview will generate some more audience for other content of the network thus increasing their ad revenue in the long run as well.

I'll be curious to learn about the real revenue if it will be disclosed.

[Note: Edited for a stupid miscalculation]

Children's deep processing of commercial messages

Together with Heidi Vandebosch (Antwerp University) I did a series of studies trying to demonstrate that children (6 years old) are not the mere peripheral processors they are often considered to be. In fact, the processing of persuasive messages by these children could be as profound as adults' processing. This has strong implications with regard to the type of attitude change to be expected. Rather than being superficial and short-term, this insight suggests children are strongly influenced with possibly long-term consequences.

Slideshare presentation

One possible reason why, in the past, many have considered children to be rather superficial in their processing of persuasive messages is that they are targeted with cues adults easily identify as persuasive tools (e.g. cartoon character endorsements, jingles, colorful images). However, these cues do not necessarily differ on a theoretical level from the cues that have effects among adults (such as visual imagery to convey product features, adult celebrity endorsements, humor, etcetera).

To learn more about our studies, please take a look at the slidedeck that was presented at the CTC2012 conference in Milan:

http://www.slideshare.net/timsmitstim/young-childrens-deep-processing-of-endorsement-marketing

Consumers’ expected quality of high discount daily deal services

Below is a guest post by Sanne Meussen, who studied consumer responses to daily deal websites in her master's thesis (which I supervised). Apart from the to-be-expected preference for higher discounts on such websites, she also found some evidence that there is a hidden danger to these high discounts...

Even though Groupon has lost $10 billion of its market value in less than one year, the number of subscribers is still growing. Apparently, consumers are still interested in high discount deals on daily deal websites. Why wouldn’t they, if they can eat a first-class meal at a local restaurant with a 75% discount? Groupon even points out: ‘we want each Groupon purchase to feel too good to be true’.