Persuasive Advertising - J. Scott Armstrong [152]
7.13.1. Use disclaimers or corrective advertising only if they provide information customers need
Corrective advertising that provides information that is vital to consumers’ decision-making is likely to improve customer decision-making. It can enhance believability because it represents a two-sided argument. If it provides a good response to the negative issue, it would be expected to be persuasive in transmitting the original message. However, disclaimers and corrective advertising should be used only to provide information that is relevant and important, otherwise they are likely to distract customers—and lead them to make inferior decisions.
When using a disclaimer, make every effort to state it in a positive manner. By their nature, disclaimers often use negative words, and negative words are difficult to understand.
Government-mandated corrective advertising and disclaimers typically fail to meet their objectives. There are three key problems:
• lack of relevance to decision-making by customers
• difficulty in comprehension due to negative words
• misperceptions resulting from pairing two objects and saying they are not related; over time, people often remember them as being related.
Government-mandated corrective advertising and disclaimers are relatively new. In the United States, they started in the early 1970s with a Campbell soup ad that emphasized the vegetables in a photo by placing marbles under them. This led to investigations, some of which lasted for years, with the findings based on judgment rather than research.
Based on research to date, the net effect is that ads of this type harm customers’ decision-making. In addition, they increase media placement costs. Finally, they interfere with commercial free speech and thus can lead to expensive legal proceedings in which the government must show that the corrective ads or disclaimers are required to protect consumers. A review of the early years of corrective ads and disclaimers in the United States is provided by Wilkie, McNeill, and Mazis (1984).
Those who are concerned with aiding consumers should be wary of mandated disclaimers and corrective advertising. They should only be used if they are supported by empirical experiments in the given situation. Such experiments are expensive to conduct.
Evidence on the effects of corrective advertising and disclaimers
Berlex Laboratories (part of Schering-Plough) was ordered to provide a disclaimer stating that it had no relationship with another company, Schering AG. The disclaimer stated that “Schering AG, West Germany, is not connected with Schering-Plough Corporation or Schering Corporation, Kenilworth, New Jersey.” An ad making the disclaimer was compared with one making no disclaimer—and also with one that had a “claimer” (the claimer said the companies were related). The subjects were given as much time as they wanted, and they responded immediately after they reviewed the brochures The disclaimer had a modest effect in reducing the level of incorrect responses from 58 percent to 46 percent. Surprisingly, however, the percentage of people who thought the companies were related was higher for the disclaimer than for the claimer (Jacoby and Szybillo 1994). Note that the information in this disclaimer did not have any obvious value to customers.
Two lab experiments found that stating that a claim is false led the subjects to identify it as false in the immediate future, but after three days, it led them to remember it as true, because the two things were connected in their mind. These memory problems were more pronounced for older adults (Skurnik et al. 2005).
From their experiment on disclaimers that a brand of clothing was not licensed by the National Football League, Jacoby and Raskopf (1986) concluded