food & beverages

Savoring Success: Creative Strategies That Make Food and Beverage Ads Work

  • JOURNAL OF ADVERTISING RESEARCH

Digital marketing’s fast pace allows for unprecedented testing of what drives ad success. This study combines human coding and machine learning across over 2,300 food, beverage and restaurant video ads, to reveal how sensory cues like “crunch sounds” and human interaction can significantly boost brand awareness, consideration and purchase intent—while some commonly used tactics, surprisingly, fall flat.

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How Offline Versus Online Promotional Media Affects Consumer Response

  • JOURNAL OF ADVERTISING RESEARCH

In the digital age, marketers are increasingly utilizing online sales promotions. However, this study hypothesized that offline (versus online) media more effectively induce consumer behavioral responses to sales promotion. Field and lab experiments supported this hypothesis, showing that sending print (versus online) coupons increased redemption behavior. This effect was mediated by cognitive engagement with the content and was more pronounced among consumers with low (versus high) brand attachment. These results were consistently replicated across different product categories.

This study provides behavior-based evidence supporting the effectiveness of offline media and highlights brand attachment as a new moderator of the effect. The findings caution against marketers’ overdependence on online sales promotion and suggest that offline promotional media can enhance consumers’ cognitive engagement with the content, leading to better behavioral outcomes.

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  • Article

How to Balance Consumer Response to “Skimpflation”

Rising costs are an important issue for businesses. Many wonder how they should respond and how customers will react if they say, reduce product quality. Such “skimpflation” can be harder for consumers to detect. However, this Marketing Science Institute (MSI) working paper finds that those who do realize it consider the practice deceptive and unfair. Consumers, it seems, prefer reduced product size (shrinkflation) or increased prices to skimpflation, with price increases the most popular/least unpopular of these options.