Contingent Impact of Service Advertising on Consumer Response

Abstract

newlineServices have peculiar characteristics, making them, unlike products. Services are challenging to advertisement and therefore marketers have to utilise the most suitable tangibilizing strategy as well as advertising appeal to communicate and market them. newlineThis research is an attempt to investigate the contingent impact of various tangibilizing strategies and advertising appeal on consumer response in service advertising. Moreover, there is an attempt to probe into the typology of service while analysing the impact of tangibilizing strategy as well as advertising appeal. newlineThis research studies the moderating impact of typology of service on the tangibilizing strategies and advertising appeals being used in service advertising. There are two major services-experiential and utilitarian. An experimental design being conducted and dummy advertisements with fictitious brand names were created to measure the effectiveness of the tangibilizing strategy and advertising appeal. Qualitative methods like in depth interviews and quantitative method like survey have been used to collect the data. Content analysis, factor analysis, repetitive measures ANOVA and Paired T test were used to analyze and interpret the data. The results showed that there is an impact of tangibilizing strategy as well as advertising appeal on consumer response. Moreover, visualization as a tangibilizing strategy was more effective compared to other strategies and an emotional appeal was more effective compared to rational appeal. Considering the typology of service, visualization as a tangibilizing strategy and emotional as an advertising appeal was more effective for an experiential service compared to a utilitarian service whereas documentation as a tangibilizing strategy and rational as an advertising appeal was more effective for a utilitarian service compared to an experiential service. newline