Our research investigates the marketing of preventive and curative "remedies" (products and services that offer ways of mitigating risk by decreasing either its likelihood or severity). Examples include debt consolidation loans and smoking cessation aids. Like risk-avoidance messages,...

Conventional wisdom suggests that more concrete and detailed information is helpful in evaluating new products. The current research, however, demonstrates that when consumers use visualization to evaluate new products, the value of concrete versus abstract visualization is dependent on the...

A laboratory experiment replicates and extends prior research on how competitive advertising and retrieval cues affect consumer memory and evaluations of brands. The number and valence of competing ads, presence of ad retrieval cues, and valence of target ads were manipulated. A high level of...

The increased priority placed on branding by marketers in recent years offers an opportunity for consumer researchers to provide valuable insights and guidance. In particular, in highly competitive marketplaces, marketers often must link their brands to other entities, for example, people,...

A crucial communication task for unknown brands is to build the knowledge in consumers' minds necessary to become established. However, communication effectiveness may depend on prior familiarity of the advertised brand. The findings of two experiments using television ads and computer Internet...