Advertising , Consumer Awareness and Choice :

Does advertising serve to (i) increase awareness of a product, (ii) increase the likelihood that the product is considered carefully, or (iii) does it shift consumer utility conditional on having considered it? We utilize a detailed data set on consumers’ shopping behavior and choices over retail bank accounts to investigate advertising’s effect on product awareness, consideration, and choice. Our data set has information regarding the entire “purchase funnel,” i.e., we observe the set of retail banks that the consumers are aware of, which banks they considered, and which banks they chose to open accounts with. We formulate a structural model that accounts for each of the three stages of the shopping process: awareness, consideration, and choice. Advertising is allowed to affect each of these separate stages of decision-making. Our model also endogenizes the choice of consideration set by positing that consumers undertake costly search. Our results indicate that advertising in this market is primarily a shifter of awareness, as opposed to consideration or choice. We view this result as evidence that advertising serves a primarily informative role in the U.S. retail banking industry.