Effect of Deceptive Advertising On Claim Recall: An Experimental Research

Summary

---

Consumers recall or use different criteria to evaluate a brand. This study intends to find out if false claims are recalled more often than true claims in an advertisement. The present study attempts to achieve this objective by using a modified version of an analgesic print advertisement in an experimental design. Results of the study reveal that when both true and false claims are present in the same advertisement, then true claims are recalled more often than false claims. However, the order in which true and false claims are recalled is found to be insignificant.

See the full content of this document

Extract

---

Effect of Deceptive Advertising On Claim Recall: An Experimental Research

INTRODUCTION

The use of deception in advertising is widespread. Deceptive advertising has been frequently used by firms (Burke et al, 1988), but a bigger question is whether it is in the firm's best interest to deceive the public through false, misleading ads. Presence of deception and its effect on the behavior of consumers has been the area of interest among advertisers and marketers. There have been cases of deceptive advertising within the industry and thus this subject has been of great concern for consumers and policy makers.

The subject of deception and correction has been discussed in various research papers, but research on understanding the effect of such claims on consumer behavior has appeared in journals only recently. Few studies have made an attempt towards defining and measuring deception. Policy professionals have taken a lead in classifying certain advertisements as "false "or "deceptive" or "misleading".

RELEVANT LITERATURE

Deceptive Advertising and Brand Recall

Consumers are faced with a very large number of advertisements everyday in different media. This makes the job of the policy makers very difficult to judge the misleading nature of all such messages. The task can be made simpler if such questions are reserved only for critical cases; the majority of the work should concern itself not with the question whether an advertisement does mislead, but whether it has the capacity to mislead (Preston, 1977).

When consumers believe an advertisement to be true when it is...

See the full content of this document

---