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peacemeal ads那篇
In a piecemeal ad, the sponsor brand is compared to one competitor on a particular
dimension, a second competitor on a different dimension, a third competitor on yet another
dimension, and so on. The danger to consumers lies in the tendency to believe that the
sponsor is superior in an overall sense, as would be true if the sponsor were being
compared to competitors that truly excel on each dimension. In fact, the sponsor mayscore next-to-last on each dimension, surpassing only the lone identi®ed competitor. Thus,
an erroneous conclusion may be drawn from literally true assertions.
When a ®rm's messages are deliberately structured to foster misinterpretation, the
potential for deception arises (see Harris and Monaco 1978). Consumers may fall prey to
such deception for at least three reasons. First, there are strong conventions that govern
communication. For example, the most obvious meaning of a message should be the
correct one and, more generally, messages should be informative, relevant, and truthful
(Grice 1975). Unless led to believe otherwise, consumers may assume that these
conventions are being followed in commercial messages. Second, irrespective of conversa-
tional norms, a fundamental bias of the cognitive system is to assume that comprehended
information is veridical (Gilbert 1991). Disbelief, in contrast, requires a subsequent and
deliberate effort. When considered in the context of pragmatic implication, this bias
suggests two additional barriers to accurate interpretation: (i) Attempts to disbelieve must
be made quickly because verbatim memory for a linguistic expression may be ¯eeting (see
Alba and Hasher 1983). (ii) Disbelief will be especially unlikely when processing is
constrained. Thus, consumers may explicitly assess the believability of a message only
when prompted by skepticism-inducing cues in the message or environment. Finally,
proper interpretation of an utterance can be exceedingly dif®cultÐeven when the normal
conventions are abandoned and one deliberately attempts to assess the veracity of a
statement. Research performed across a variety of domains, including advertising, has
demonstrated the relative ineffectiveness of forewarning and training on consumers' ability
to discriminate between literal assertions and the pragmatic implications of those
assertions (Harris 1977; Harris, Teske, and Ginns 1975). Taken together, these character-
istics of linguistic processing suggest that consumers may be very vulnerable to the effects
of misleading piecemeal messages |
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