Mutable Meaning of Ads 1 Running head: MUTABLE MEANING OF ADS The Mutable Meaning of Ads: Advertising through the Eyes of the Skeptical Consumer

Despite apparent public cynicism toward advertising, consumers are surprisingly cooperative when presented with advertising information, often drawing conclusions that are not logically contained within ads. Unfortunately, going beyond what is claimed by an advertisement can lead to invalid inferences and suboptimal consumer choice. This research examines the effect of suspicion on consumers’ interpretation of two advertising practices in which claims are made by implication. I find evidence that suspicion undermines trust and disrupts consumers’ normal tendency to “go along” with the gist of what the advertiser is saying, producing less favorable brand attitudes. Results also suggest that suspicion can prompt people to infer that the marketer deliberately worded product claims in order to mislead them. Mutable Meaning of Ads 3 The Mutable Meaning of Ads: Advertising through the eyes of the Skeptical Consumer Despite apparent public cynicism toward advertising (Calfee and Ringold 1988), consumers are surprisingly cooperative when presented with advertising information. Studies have shown that consumers not only draw conclusions that are not logically contained within ads (Preston 1967; Shimp 1978; Russo, Metcalf & Stephens 1981) but that this tendency to go beyond the information given is particularly likely when information is presented as advertising (Preston & Scharbach, 1971). Interestingly, this effect seems to hold even when consumers are explicitly instructed not to go beyond the information given (Harris 1977). In sum, the willingness of consumers to “go along” with advertising is a very powerful effect. In many cases, of course, the ad-based inferences consumers make about products are a fair and accurate reflection of reality. But going beyond what is claimed by the advertiser often leads to inaccuracies, and hence to sub-optimal decision making by consumers. Indeed, most deceptive advertising succeeds not because the claims are themselves untruthful, but because they prompt consumers to make invalid inferences (Preston 1977). Recognizing this, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has come to define deceptive advertising in terms of its propensity to mislead consumers, rather than the literal truthfulness of the individual claims (FTC 1983). One obvious solution to this problem is for consumers to scrutinize claims more carefully, since this would presumably make them more likely to recognize when an ad is implying something without stating it. Research in the area of persuasion suggests that careful scrutiny of advertising occurs when consumers are motivated and able to do so, such as when Mutable Meaning of Ads 4 they are involved in the ad or product category (Petty & Cacioppo 1986). Ironically, however, Johar (1996) has found that consumers who process claims more carefully are sometimes more prone to making invalid inferences, and that deception depends on the processing demands of the advertising claim. Thus, merely being motivated to pay attention does not appear to insulate consumers against deception, or make them less likely to draw inferences from advertising. The type of motivation may matter, however. Research in social psychology has shown that suspicion prompts people to pay close attention to argument quality (Priester & Petty 1995) much in the same way consumer involvement does. But there is also evidence that suspicion can motivate people to behave defensively in order to avoid being deceived. In a series of studies, Ritchie and Darke (2000) found that subjects who were made to feel suspicious toward an advertiser not only counterargued claims made by that advertiser, they also tended to discount claims made by other, unrelated marketers. This suggests that consumers may not always be so willing to accept advertising claims as previous work has suggested. An interesting empirical question, then, is whether suspicion might also attenuate consumers’ willingness to go beyond the information given in advertising. Research from linguistics suggests that people “read between the lines” and accept implications as fact because it is generally functional to do so. The time constraints associated with everyday interaction make it impractical for individuals to be completely precise about what they mean. Instead, communication is governed by “rules of conversation” (Grice 1975), a set of tacit conventions which oblige communicators to be relevant, truthful, informative and clear. Widespread adherence to these rules makes it reasonable for listeners to assume that speakers mean what they seem to mean. Thus when people find themselves in a marketing context and Mutable Meaning of Ads 5 recognize that an ad does not literally make a claim, they are nonetheless inclined to accept it as true if this appeared to be the intention of the advertiser. Central to this kind of conversational inference, however, is the listener’s willingness to trust that the speaker is being cooperative by observing the rules of conversation. Since suspicious consumers are, by definition, less trusting, it seems reasonable to surmise that they will be less willing to “go along” with what the advertiser seems to be saying. Moreover, when the notion of the cooperative communicator is called into doubt, suspicion may even prompt consumers to make an entirely different inference – namely, that the marketer is making implied rather than explicit claims with the intention of deceiving them. This latter line of reasoning closely parallels thinking in Friestad and Wright’s (1994) Persuasion Knowledge Model. The PKM suggests that when a person identifies an agent’s action as a persuasion tactic, rather than an incidental element of the interaction, the result is a “change of meaning” that fundamentally alters the way the target interprets and responds to the persuasion attempt. In this paper, I propose that suspicion can serve as a catalyst that instigates this change of meaning, and that the result is a negatively biased interpretation of the marketer’s tactic as an attempt to mislead consumers. More specifically, I argue that suspicion (1) disrupts the normal inference-making process in which consumers go along with the gist of what the advertiser is saying, and (2) prompts inferences that the marketer has deliberately worded product claims in order to mislead consumers. To test this idea, I looked for commonly used advertising practices that could exhibit the “mutable meaning” suggested by the PKM – features that would be seen as innocuous by typical consumers, but which could also plausibly be interpreted as attempts to mislead. A search of the marketing literature suggested that two practices – missing information and qualified claims – merited special investigation in this regard. Mutable Meaning of Ads 6