Assumptions about focus group interviewing were tested. Individual interviews generated more ideas than focus groups, eight-member groups generated significantly more ideas than four-member groups, no differences were found between focus groups and unmoderated discussion groups, and the effect of acquaintanceship was not clearly determined.

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Previous research and reviews on comparative advertising report mixed results. The authors report the results from a meta-analysis that examines the efficacy of comparative advertising. The analysis shows that comparative ads are more effective than noncomparative ads in generating attention, message and brand awareness, levels of message processing, favorable sponsored brand attitudes, and increased purchase intentions and purchase behaviors. However, comparative ads evoke lower source believability and a less favorable attitude toward the ad. Additional analyses of moderator variables find that market position (sponsor, comparison, and relative), enhanced credibility, message content, and type of dependent measure (relative versus nonrelative) affect some of the relationships between advertising format and cognition, brand attitudes, and purchase intentions. New brands comparing themselves to established brands appear to benefit most from comparative advertising.

This research adds to the growing body of literature in consumer socialization by examining intergenerational influence on brand preferences and consumption orientations in parents and young-adult offspring. Two factors suggested in past research to affect intergenerational influence are investigated: conformity to peers and communication effectiveness. A new rigorous method is introduced to demonstrate intergenerational similarity in mother/daughter dyads, distinct from an incipient level of similarity that may occur by chance. Results indicate that communication effectiveness is positively related to intergenerational agreement in all six consumption domains studied, whereas daughter's conformity motivation is related only to prestige sensitivity. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.

Foot in the door and door in the face have been cited frequently as effective strategies for gaining compliance with behavioral requests. However, research efforts to confirm these two phenomena have produced mixed results. After deriving predictions about how the favorability of available information influences compliance, the authors report a synthesis of research results for both paradigms. Combined effect sizes across research results for several moderating variables are compiled. Implications for theoretical, empirical, and practical application of the syntheses are discussed.Twenty years ago Freedman and Fraser (1966) asked, "How can a person be induced to do something he would rather not do?" Since then, more than 50 studies have sought the answer through research following one of two paradigms, the foot in the door (FITD) and/or the door in the face (DITF). This research tradition has not been programmatic and as a result some mediating variables and theoretical explanations have been given more research attention than others. Therefore, it is not surprising to fmd little agreement as to what conditions are necessary to produce statistically significant differences in compliance with behavioral request strategies.Both strategies are attempts to obtain behavioral compliance through the use of sequential requests. In the footin-the-door paradigm, the first request is relatively small and all or a large majority of people agree to comply. The small request is followed by a larger request, called the "critical request," which is actually the target behavior. Operationally, the door in the face is the reverse strategy, in that the initial request is relatively very large and all or a large majority of people refuse to comply. The large request is followed by a smaller request, the critical request, which is the target behavior.

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The authors examine family purchase-decision dynamics to shed light on enhancing marketing communication effectiveness. In particular, the authors are interested in understanding the temporal nature of spousal behavioral interaction in family decision making to help marketers target communication messages, shape brand choice, and guide personal selling activities. The authors calibrate a dynamic simultaneous equations model to investigate spousal family purchase-decision behavior: What are spousal behavioral interactions in a discrete purchase decision, and what are the temporal aspects of spousal decision behavior across decisions? The results indicate that spouses tend both not to reciprocate coercion in a discrete decision and to adjust influence strategies over time. The authors also investigate the effectiveness of influence strategies and spousal satisfaction with decisions and their impacts on spousal subsequent decision behaviors from a postdecision perspective as a mechanism to explain why spouses revise decision behaviors across purchase decisions. The authors discuss marketing implications of their findings and present ideas about how to use these findings creatively to target advertising and sales messages to influential spouses in specific decision contexts.