The Impact of Evaluation Context on Attribute Processing and Attitude Formation: The Example of Comparative Advertising

Prior research indicates that consumer preferences often depend on the evaluation context, such that different evaluation tasks and different types of attributes used to describe product alternatives have varying influences on preference formation. This study investigates whether these findings also might apply to the effectiveness of comparative versus non-comparative advertising that uses different types of attributes to promote the advertised product alternative, because of contradictory findings regarding the effectiveness of comparative advertising. The authors analyze whether comparable versus enriched attributes to promote product alternatives exert varied influences on the degree of differentiation induced by comparative versus non-comparative advertising for a familiar brand. In the case of high product involvement among advertising recipients, comparable attributes induce significantly greater effectiveness for comparative advertising than do enriched attributes.