Companies increasingly involve consumers in the process of developing advertising and other marketing actions. An important question that has not been explored is whether brands benefit from communicating to consumers who had not been involved in the co-creation process that a target ad was developed by a fellow consumer. The authors propose a skepticism–identification model of ad creator influence, which hypothesizes that disclosing to an audience that an ad was created by a consumer triggers two opposing effects: skepticism about the competence of the ad creator and identification with the ad creator. Four studies demonstrate that the effectiveness of disclosing advertising co-creation depends on factors that hinder skepticism and heighten identification with the ad creator. Specifically, attributing the ad to a consumer is shown to increase persuasion when the audience (1) has limited cognitive resources to scrutinize the message, (2) is given background information about the ad creator that enhances source similarity, and (3) has high loyalty toward the brand. The implications of these findings on marketing theory and practice are discussed.

In this article, the authors propose an integrative model of advertising persuasion that orders the major theories and empirically supported generalizations about persuasion that have been offered in the information-processing literature. The authors begin by reviewing this literature, placing particular emphasis on the assorted processes or mechanisms that have been suggested to mediate persuasion. To consolidate this material, the authors propose a framework that delineates three alternative strategies that people may use to process persuasive communications and form judgments, in which each strategy represents a different level of cognitive resources that is employed during message processing. In addition, the framework identifies a judgment correction stage that allows people to attempt to correct their initial judgments for biases that they perceive may have affected such judgments. The authors add to this by identifying particular processes that appear to mediate when and how these judgment formation and judgment correction processes operate. They also attempt to foster growth by specifying some of the critical issues and gaps in the knowledge that appear to impede further progress. Finally, the authors clarify how the proposed framework can inform the decisions advertising practitioners make about advertising execution and media factors. E very day, U.S. consumers are exposed to no less than 1000 commercial messages (Kotler 1997*). Regardless of their content and the techniques they employ, most messages share a common final goal: persuading target consumers to adopt a particular product, service, or idea. How do advertising messages influence consumers' judgments and preferences and thereby advance persuasion? A vast body of work has explored this question from various perspectives, seeking to develop a theoretical understanding of the persuasion process. Yet, to date, no single theory or framework that has been developed has been able to account for all the varied and sometimes conflicting persuasion findings. Presumably, this is because the complex process of persuasion is intricately dependent on a myriad of contextual, situational, and individual difference factors, whereas the theories remain relatively simplistic and narrowly developed.The inability of existing theories to accommodate all persuasion findings need not suggest, however, that these theories are inaccurate. Rather, we propose that these theories simply may represent pieces of persuasion processes that operate in certain conditions that are not always clearly specified. This view is consistent with the popular assump-*Authors were limited in the numberof references used in text, therefore, those references marked with an * are available at www.

We hypothesize that the accessibility of task-relevant knowledge determines whether judgments reflect the substance of the information that is brought to mind or the ease of generating and retrieving such information. Our findings indicate that when relevant knowledge is highly accessible or not at all accessible, judgments are based on the content of the information considered. Between these extremes in knowledge accessibility, judgments are based on the perceived ease with which information can be retrieved. This perceived ease is a function of both the number of reasons requested and the wording of the retrieval request. (c) 2005 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..

The authors examine the effect of type of elaboration on information processing and product judgments. Research participants were shown print advertisements promoting a camera in which the pictorial material depicted either product features mentioned in the copy (attribute-focused condition) or people, objects, or usage occasions captured by the camera (image-focused condition). These advertisements were presented in the context of advertisements for competing brands of cameras or for products in categories unrelated to cameras. When the context was composed of competing cameras, the attribute-focused advertisement resulted in more favorable target camera judgments than did the image-focused advertisement, whereas when products unrelated to cameras served as the context, the image-focused advertisement prompted more favorable judgments. These results are interpreted as evidence that product judgments are more favorable when an advertising message receives two types of elaboration, item-specific and relational, than when only one of these types of elaboration is dominant.

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