"A Study on the Effect of Advertisement Variation Strategy Concentrating on the Role of the Order of Attribute Information Presentation"

Dong-Hoon Lee(Department of Business Admin. Graduate School Sogang University)

Efficient management of advertisement is an important task in marketing. The purpose of this study is to concentrate on the attribute memory effect of message organization which has been rather neglected in previous research of advertisement variation strategy. Experimental methods were used in order to achieve the objective of this study.

The major findings of this study can be summarized as follows :

1. The attribute information presented at the very beginning is relatively better memorized when it is at the end-of-sequence procedure. Also consumers bear more favorable attitude towards the attribute informations when they are perceived through by step-by-step procedure. Therefore one can conclude that consumers perceive attribute information differently according to the type of their attribute information perception.

2. When the personal relevance of their task is low, consumers memorized the information presented to them at the very beginning of the procedure better. The suggests that according to consumer's relevance of there task, when they are presented with information the position of information presentation order and the recall of memory is different.

The implication of this study are as follows :

First, the previous studies on the order effect was limited to the field of impression formation in cognitive psychology or psychological process, but this study has attempted to apply order effect to marketing. As a result of this study, the order effect which resulted in primacy effect and recency effect in cognitive psychology was also true in the case of information presentation of advertisement.

This suggests marketing managers an adequate integration model when setting up strategies. It can help in deciding whether to advertise its important attributes at the first or last according to the consumer's involvement to purchase product. Even though the messages may be same, they can be perceived differently by consumers accordingly to the order they are presented. Advertising message strategy on high involvement groups should be arranged so that the important feature is presented at the last, while these features should be presented at the beginning for low involvement groups for effective advertising.

Second, one can take advantage of the fact that consumers perceive same advertisement differently according to the type of advertisement presentation can also be applied to magazine advertisement. Currently, there are a few magazine advertisements advertising one brand sequentially, but it is anticipated that advertising four types of advertisement all together in sequence will result in similar effect as end-of-sequence response mode, thus most effective way is to present important attribute at the beginning.

Third, consumers recall same advertisement differently according to the information presentation order and type of response, therefore marketing managers must take this into full account when calculating the effect of advertisement. In most cases, consumers perceive effect of advertising similar to that of end of sequence response mode. Thus the effect of advertisement very accordingly to when it is measured and one can raise questions to the validity of measurement.

Forth, companies can take into account the suggestions mentioned above when deciding the advertising budget.