A Study of the Corrective Advertising's Message Strategy

Jae Jin Park (Department of Business Administration Graduate School of Seoul National University)

I. Introduction

Advertising has a large responsibility within our economic system and is a highly visible and important institution affecting many people. What role should the government play in regulating advertising? This question has occupied the attention of businessmen, politicians, and citizens for many years. The most significant question pertaining to advertising regulation concerns deceptive advertising. If the information provided is misleading or deceptive, then the responsibility of advertising in providing information for consumer decision making is not being fulfilled.

The results is, in economic terms, a misallocation of resources. In more personal terms, the result is a disappointed buyer or, worse, a real economic or physical injury. The need to avoid deception in advertising is well recognized by both industry and government leadership.

Consumers have the right to obtain information that is not misleading and that does not claim too much. They also have the right to product packaging and labeling that is not deceptive. A subjective definition of deception is beginning to be more accepted in the regulation of marketing communications than an objective definition. A subjective definition of deception, however, focuses upon the consumer's perception of the advertisement. Gardner, after reviewing the contributions of other consumer researcher on this topic, formulated the following definition of deception.

If an advertisement leaves the consumer with an impression(s) and/or belief(s) different from what would normally be expected if the consumer had reasonable knowledge, and that impression(s) and/or belief(s) is factually untrue or potentially misleading, then deception is said to exist.

II. Theoretical Background

1. Past research on the effect of corrective advertising.

Consumer research has the potential of providing valuable inputs in the formation of public policy designed to regulate programs of consumer influence. Three areas of these inputs are establishing program priorities, fact-finding, and remedy and compliance.

A third area of input by consumer research into policy making is in the area of investigating the effects of various forms of remedies and methods for obtaining compliance. It is important to understand the effects and effectiveness of remedies, both proposed and implemented, to both business and government.

It is also in the consumer's interest, because if regulations are implemented that have serious adverse effects or are not cost-effective in their results, the long-run effect will be to injure the ability to obtain effective regulation needed by consumers. A remedy for deceptive advertising used by the Korean Fair Trade Commission is corrective advertising, which may be any advertising designed to correct pat deception.

Early research focused on the impact that corrective advertising had on brand awareness, purchase intentions, and attitudes toward the brand, toward the company image, toward the advertisement.

Later research studied their impact o consumer beliefs. Awareness, beliefs, attitudes, and intentions are the dependent variables most ofter used to assess communication impact and are usually major components in most accepted conceptualizations of the communication process.

Consideration of these models reveals that, in each case, comprehension is assumed to precede belief formation and change. It is only after information has been comprehended that one can reasonably expect is to influence beliefs, attitudes, intentions, and behavior.

Hence, both regulator efforts to mandate remedial statements and previous researcher efforts to assess the impact of such statements necessarily rest on a critical, buy as yet unverified assumption, namely, that the logically prior step of comprehension has been accomplished.

Studies on corrective advertising suggest that remedial messages may also fail to be correctly comprehended.

In other words, remedial statements may be at least as confusing and misleading as the advertising they are designed to counteract.

2. Corrective advertising's message strategy.

Consider the process whereby human beings extract meaning from the communications they receive. When a source deliberately engages in communication, he/she does so because there is some thought or feeling that he/she wishes the other party(i. e. the receiver) to understand. Unfortunately, the thought that exists in the mind of a source cannot be directly transposed into the mind of a receiver. For the source to communicate a thought (i. e evoke the intended meaning in the mind of the receiver), he/she must convert it into some externally denotable form (e.g., the spoken word, written words, some visible gesture) and convey this to the receiver. In turn, the receiver must then decode or interpret this over expression and extract meaning from in hopefully, the same meaning intended by the source.

Figure 1 depicts this sequence of events. In terms of the vocabulary that has evolved, meaning structure is the label used to designate thoughts and feelings as they exist in the minds of individuals. Surface structure in the label used to designate the externally visible expressions of these thoughts. The source, in communicating a particular thought (which we shall designate as Meaning Structure 1), uses some surface structure in an attempt to evoke the same thought (Meaning Structure 1) in the mind of the receiver.

Should this surface structure succeed in evoking precisely this one thought, then we have accurate communication. Should it fail to evoke Meaning Structure I but succeed in evoking some other meaning in the mind of the receiver(say Meaning Structure 2 or 3 or 4), then we have miscommunication. Should the source succeed in evoking Meaning Structure 1 but also evoke one or more other meaning structures, then we have ambiguous, confusing communication(i.e., a combination of accurate and inaccurate communication).

Given this model of the communication of meaning, one general question which might be asked is:"What types of surface structures are most likely to evoke high levels of miscomprehension?" Some answers to this question are suggested by the literature on human information processing.

Evidence suggests that comprehension is made mord difficult as the number of concepts increase and finite memory resources are expended to maintain information in active memory for processing. Considerable research has demonstrated that sentences containing negation are semantically more complex and, therefore more difficult to comprehend.