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Understanding the Mechanisms Behind Consumers’ Appreciation of Editorial Support
Claas Christian Germelmann, University of Bayreuth, Germany
Andrea Groeppel-Klein, Saarland University, Germany
We investigate how consumers’ appreciation of editorial support is contingent on perceived medium quality and on the activation of
consumers’ persuasion knowledge. Echoing the call for more realistic designs, two experiments under incidental exposure conditions
reveal undesirable effects of this common advertising technique if both contingency variables are controlled for.
[to cite]:
Claas Christian Germelmann and Andrea Groeppel-Klein (2015) ,"Understanding the Mechanisms Behind Consumers’
Appreciation of Editorial Support", in NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 43, eds. Kristin Diehl and Carolyn Yoon,
Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 536-537.
[url]:
http://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/1019568/volumes/v43/NA-43
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Understanding the Mechanisms Behind Consumers’ Appreciation of Editorial Support
Claas Christian Germelmann, University of Bayreuth, Germany
Andrea Groeppel-Klein, Saarland University, Germany
EXTENDED ABSTRACT
Editorial support, i.e. the combination of advertisements with
corresponding favorable news stories within one medium, is widely
believed to increase advertising effectiveness (Kim et al. 2010). We
wish to extend the findings in this stream of research by analyzing
conditions and limitations of the reported positive coupling effect
with specific respect to low-involvement situations. Given the importance of media qualities as contextual cues for the evaluation of
messages, we expect 1) that perceived objectivity of the editorial
content ad gauged from the medium will have an impact on consumers’ reactions towards coupling. 2) We hypothesize that accessibility of persuasion knowledge and defense goals may influence the
mechanism by which editorial support as persuasion attempt influences consumers’ approach behavior toward the brand, e.g. in terms
of purchase intention. We argue that less attentive processes might
be equally important for the effect of editorial support on approach
behavior. Consequently, we suggest investigating the effect under
more incidental conditions, less prone to raising consumers’ task involvement than standard forced exposure. By “incidental,” we mean
contacts with media and advertising stimuli that are modeled after
natural contact situations: In such situations, advertising processing
is generally not guided by external instructions, and thus consumers
typically process the ads less actively than under forced exposure
conditions.
A key feature of the effectiveness of publicity is its higher credibility compared to ads (Kim et al. 2010; Eisend and Küster 2011).
Consumers often use their perception of media formats as a contextual cue for the validity of the information contained in the medium, particularly when their motivation to process is low (Hallahan,
1999). We expect that this contextual cue moderates the effect of
editorial support. When consumers doubt the journalistic quality of a
medium in terms of its objectivity, the repetition of the positive brand
information may then trigger a defensive processing bias (Darke and
Ritchie 2007), that works against the validity and the truth effect
caused by the repetition (Arkes, Boehm, and Xu 1991; Roggeveen
and Johar 2002), leading to reduced purchase intentions.
Hypothesis 1: Under incidental exposure conditions, the effect
of editorial support on purchase intentions for
a brand is more negative than if the ad appears
alone, if consumers perceive the journalistic
quality of the medium as low.
Editorial content is supposed to be more credible than ads
since it stems from a “third party” that lacks ulterior motives and
manipulative intent (Hallahan 1999). However, Friestad and Wright
(1994; 1995) posit that consumers have heuristics about the persuasion strategies used in marketing communication. The heuristic “If
a positive editorial report about a brand appears in the same medium as an advertisement for that brand, then beware!” could alert
consumers to the manipulation that is presumably intended by coupling, without elaboration on the specific instance of this persuasive
attempt at hand. The mere presence of the coupling might activate
(unconsciously) defense goals (Liberman and Chaiken 1992; Darke
and Ritchie 2007). Chartrand, Dalton, and Fitzsimons (2007) found
strong evidence of automatic reactance that can arise without cognitive elaboration, and without conscious intention to behave reactant.
We argue that with editorial support, i.e. the intentional coupling
of an ad and editorial coverage, being heuristically identified as an
overly strong and “authoritative” persuasion attempt, the coupling
could spur an unconscious reactance reaction, which would lead to
avoiding the brand altogether.
Hypothesis 2: Under incidental exposure conditions, editorial support will lead consumers to react to the
brand with lower purchase intentions than if the
advertisement were to stand alone.
We tested H1 and H2 in an experimental study (N = 68 nonMarketing undergrads) under incidental exposure conditions (radio
as background medium, “living room” setting, cover story and distraction tasks). Using PROCESS model 1 (Hayes 2013) we found a
significant and negative main effect of editorial support on purchase
intentions for the advertised financial service (t = -2.79, p = .007)
and a significant interaction of editorial support and perceived media
quality (t = 2.39, p = .020, corroborating H1 and H2.
We propose that the activation or accessibility of persuasion
knowledge as a contingency variable can further explain the undesirable effect found in study 1. As Skard and Thorbjørnsen (2014)
found, consumers possess knowledge about why ads are purposefully
placed next to news stories about a brand. Such specific knowledge
could quickly be activated as heuristic even without intense elaboration on the material. Then coupling will be less effective because
consumers might feel—consciously or unconsciously—skeptical toward the claims about the brand in the news story and the ad (Johar,
Maheswaran und Peracchio 2006), and defense motivations might be
activated, which lead to avoidance behavior. We test this mechanism
by priming persuasion knowledge
Hypothesis 3:
When persuasion knowledge is activated under
incidental exposure, consumers show lower purchase intentions for a brand that uses editorial
support compared to a situation in which they
are only confronted with an ad for the brand.
In study 2, again under the same incidental exposure conditions as in study 1, a 2 (commercial only vs. commercial plus radio
feature) x 2 (priming: neutral vs. persuasion knowledge activated)
ANCOVA with the perceived medium format objectivity measure
as covariate for the dependent measure “purchase intention” (N =
125) revealed a significant interaction between editorial support and
persuasion knowledge activation (F (1, 120) = 6.86, p = .010). Qualified by the significant interaction, a simple effect analysis showed
that, consistent with hypothesis 3, the reduction in purchase intention
between both levels of the prime was significant (F (1, 123) = 4.77,
p = .028).
Contributing to the extant literature, our findings seem to suggest that the success of editorial support as an integrated marketing
tool is contingent upon the perceived quality of the medium, and the
accessibility of persuasion knowledge. Our two experiments consistently hint to mechanisms that are distinct from the process that produced the robust positive results in previous research. If consumers
have reason to doubt the objectivity of the medium, they evaluate editorial support unfavorably. Thus, although some elaboration might
be necessary to uncover the persuasion attempt, our findings suggest
that “editorial support is an unduly persuasion attempt” kicks in as a
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Advances in Consumer Research
Volume 43, ©2015
Advances in Consumer Research (Volume 43) / 537
heuristic even when consumers are only incidentally confronted with
the stimulus. From a methodological perspective, this finding sounds
a note of caution against the use of forced exposure in experiments
on editorial support.
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