Persuasive Advertising - J. Scott Armstrong [25]
Manufacturers and retailers are good sources of relevant information, as are market research procedures that seek information about consumers. You could also study the buying process in stores to see which factors encourage transactions and which inhibit them.
Advertisers trying to communicate a substantial amount of information about a product should use still media. This is especially so when the information is complex. Television and radio advertising cannot provide as much information as print and the Internet.
Arriva, a private bus line in the United Kingdom, showed that a purely informational campaign—printed bus routes and timetables—increased bus usage by 11 percent in a field experiment representing about half of their routes, compared with usage in areas for which they did not use the campaign. The campaign won an IPA award for demonstrated effectiveness (Binet 2006).
Evidence on the value of providing information that customers need
Our analysis of quasi-experimental data supports this principle:
Print ads with product information had better recall. Our WAPB analysis found 37 pairs of print ads in which one ad provided information about the product, while the other did not. For example, an ad for Panasonic cordless telephones that detailed six important features of the phone, such as Secure Guard for protection from eavesdropping and up to 21-day battery charge, had much better recall than a Sony ad that did not contain any product information. Recall for informative ads was 1.34 times better than for the other ads.
1.3.2. Provide choices
Happiness is related to economic freedom and to the ability to choose (e.g., as shown in the cross-national study of 46 nations by Veenhoven 2000). However, in recent years there has been much discussion on whether people might now have too much choice. Some studies suggested that when people are faced with many choices, they make poorer choices and are less satisfied. This has been referred to as the paradox of choice.
In general, there is no paradox of choice. A meta-analysis of 49 published and unpublished studies on the “too much choice” effect found that across all studies there was no effect from the number of choices available (Scheibehenne, Greifeneder, and Todd 2010). As you will see below, however, the number of choices does matter—it all depends on the conditions.
If an ad makes an offer containing no choices, the customer’s energy goes into deciding whether or not to purchase. This could lead them to think of arguments against buying. By offering choices, the advertiser could change the customer’s task from “should I purchase?” to “which item should I purchase?”
Here is an example of the effect of changing the viewpoint from “whether” to “which one.” Williams-Sonoma offered only one bread-maker and priced it at $275. The company then added a larger model which cost 50 percent more. While few of the larger models sold, sales of the less-expensive unit nearly doubled (Simonson and Tversky 1992).
Customers nearly always appreciate a large number of options when they relate to easy choices, by which I mean uni-dimensional (alignable) choices—those that a customer can order on a single dimension. For example, when buying shirts, it is good to have many sizes to choose from. It is obvious also that customers want to have these choices organized (e.g., by sizes). So subject to cost considerations, sellers should provide many uni-dimensional options to their customers.
Evidence on the value of providing choices in ads
In an experiment involving chocolate, consumer satisfaction was lower when a chocolate was picked for a person than when they could make their own choice (Iyengar and