Informational and Noninformational Advertising Content

We investigate the relationship between both advertising content and quantity and several stages of consumers' decision making, namely, unaided and aided awareness, consideration, and purchase. Understanding how the amount and content of advertisements affect consumers' decision making is crucial for companies to effectively and efficiently use their advertising budgets. Spanning a time period from 2010 to 2016, we combine a unique data set on TV advertising content and quantities with individual-level data containing information on purchases, consideration and awareness sets, demographic variables, and perceived prices. Our results reveal that advertising quantity significantly increases consumer (unaided and aided) awareness but has no effect on conditional consideration and conditional purchase. However, when investigating the relationship between different types of advertising content and purchase stages, we find a more nuanced set of results: advertising only containing noninformational content increases unaided awareness, whereas advertising only containing informational content increases aided awareness. Advertising with both informational and noninformational content affects shoppers' but not nonshoppers' awareness and the awareness of other groups of involved consumers.