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’.

Fear appeal in health campaigns - smoking

Yesterday, I was on Belgian national television for the popular science show "Ook Getest op Mensen". Each episode, they try to tackle a few behavioral questions using quasi-scientific methodology. This week's episode, among others, focused on public health campaigns and sigarette packaging using visual and extreme fear appeals. As others have already claimed, those extreme fear appeals do not always result in adaptive consequences (see Witte & Allen, 2000). If not accompanied by easy to achieve goals or action plans or if they do not bolster self-efficacy, such fear appeals may result in maladaptive behaviors. The rationale is that fear appeals increase negative emotions and to reduce these negative emotions, we will do something maladaptive like avoiding the message or minimizing it. The real-life study we did produced some nice anecdotical insights.

Decrease in "showrooming" - An issue for FMCGs

Last week, @GinoVanOssel published an interesting post on the topic of showrooming. Brick-and-mortar retailers for high involvement goods face an interesting challenge from online retailers. Potential customers increasingly tend to visit showrooms to check out the products and then start searching online for the best bargain on their preferred product. So, the brick-and-mortar retailers invest in showrooms and staff, yet the online retailers get the the deal. This topic is often discussed, but less attention goes to a complementary issue in the low involvement category of FMCGs. With the steadily rising popularity of online grocery shopping and accompanying shopping apps, the producers of FMCGs are missing out on valuable marketing communications precisely because of the decrease of showrooming.