Getting consumers to generate their own ad content: The impact of imagine instructions on persuasion

David Silvera (), Frank Kardes, Bruce Pfeiffer, Ashley Arsena and R. Justin Goss
Additional contact information
David Silvera: UTSA

Working Papers from College of Business, University of Texas at San Antonio

Abstract: Some recent advertisements have attempted to increase the persuasiveness of their communications by directly asking consumers to imagine arguments supporting the ad’s message. This research provides a critical test of the effectiveness of this “imagine strategy,” while also identifying some specific situations in which this technique can be most effective in increasing persuasion. Three studies reveal that imagine instructions are most effective in cases of regulatory non-fit between consumers’ regulatory orientation and the ad content, when consumers are more dispositionally oriented toward high need for cognitive closure, and when consumers are at a high construal level. These results are consistent with the possibility that the imagine strategy works best when it can enhance the motivation level of otherwise unmotivated consumers.

Keywords: Implicit arguments; Explicit arguments; Need for cognitive closure; Construal level; Regulatory fit; Imagine instructions; Imagine strategy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: M31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2013-09-04
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://interim.business.utsa.edu/wps/mkt/0020MKT-562-2013.pdf Full text (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tsa:wpaper:0202mkt

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from College of Business, University of Texas at San Antonio Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wendy Frost ().