The Influence of Cognitive Complexity and Copy Structure on Advertising Effectiveness.

Abstract

An important issue in promotion is whether or not an advertisement communicates what it is supposed to. Perhaps a more important issue is why an advertisement communicates what it is supposed to. This research addresses both of these dimensions--the what and the why of advertising--through the concept of advertising effectiveness. The effectiveness of advertising is assessed through the following four dependent variables: Response to Advertising, Advertising Recall, Attitude Change, and Behavioral Intention. These 4 variables can be represented in a hierarchy-of-effects type model starting with Advertising Response and culminating in Behavioral Intention. Based on consumer aesthetics and cognitive processing theory, 12 hypotheses are developed to explain how a person passes through this hierarchy; these hypothesized relationships are represented in a path analysis framework. The major independent variables include: Cognitive Complexity, Ability to Predict Advertising Structure, Motivation, and Product Interest. An experiment, utilizing 241 subjects, is designed to test these hypotheses. A sample of 140 is used to estimate the model; the remaining 101 subjects are employed as a cross validation sample. Empirical support is found for all twelve hypotheses. This research provides evidence that the cloze procedure is a good technique to use in order to discriminate between ads that are complex in structure and advertisements that are more simply written. Furthermore, the results indicate that cognitively complex individuals tend to enjoy and to retain information from advertisements which are complex in structure. As such the cognitive complexity test and cloze procedure, when used in conjunction, provide a powerful way to assess the effectiveness of advertising copy. Some progress is made in determining why advertising is effective. A substantial amount of the variance in the dependent variables is explained; and the results of the predictions are especially encouraging. It is hoped that consideration of the findings in this study will be of help in formulating and conducting new research related to advertising effectiveness.