Abstract
Whether due to unaccepted guises, previous exposure to measures, or overt instructions, subjects in advertising experiments often expect testing related to ads, while individuals encountering ads in daily life feel no such expectation. The results of experiments exploring main and interactive effects of postexposure test expectation on ad retention measures are reported. In the first experiment, subjects who expected a recall or recognition test performed better on that test than subjects who expected a different measure or measures unrelated to retention. In the second experiment, the sort of test expectations which may arise when subjects encounter ads in controlled research settings moderated the effect of competitive advertising interference on recall scores. Summarily, these data suggest that test expectation may often influence the findings of advertising experiments.
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The authors wish to thank Frank Kardes and James Kellaris for their helpful comments.
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Kent, R.J., Machleit, K.A. The effects of postexposure test expectation in advertising experiments utilizing recall and recognition measures. Marketing Letters 3, 17–26 (1992). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00994077
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00994077