Empirically Distinguishing Informative and Prestige Effects of Advertising

Transcription

1 Empirically Distinguishing Informative and Prestige Effects of Advertising (Ackerberg, 2001 RAND) Department of Information, Operations and Management Sciences Stern School of Business, NYU 11/14/ Industrial Organization (Ph.D.)

2 How advertisements affect rational consumers who view them? Argument: Advertisements that give consumers product information should primarily affect consumers who have never tried the brand. Advertisements that create prestige or image effects should affect both inexperienced and experienced users. Techniques to empirically distinguish and measure different effects of brand advertising in nondurable, experience-goods markets. Important implications for optimal advertising behavior.

3 There are two different types of consumers: Inexperienced: people who have never tried the brand or product, and Experienced: those who have consumed the brand at some point in the past.

4 There are three different types of advertising: Information on product existence & search characteristics Informs consumers of a brand s existence and search characteristics. Such advertising will affect only consumers who do not already know of the brand s existence or those search characteristics. Information on experience characteristics Informs consumers about a brand s experience characteristics. Consumers who have consumed the brand more times should know more about these characteristics and be less affected. Prestige and image effects Directly affect the utility a consumer derives from consuming the brand (either increase or decrease).

5 The data Publicly 1 available consumer-level panel data on yogurt purchases and television advertising exposures to empirically examine the previous arguments households Scanner data Two geographic markets Three years ( ) Weekly prices Household TV advertising exposures Newly introduced brand (Yoplait 150) 1 A.C. Nielson data

6 Why Yoplait 150? Short shelf life (no stockpiling behavior) Newly introduced brand (no experienced consumers) Broadly advertised Competitors

7 Quantity and Price Series Figure: Time Series.

8 Advertising Series Figure: Advertising Series.

9 Results from regression Figure: Results from regression.

10 The empirical model Reduced form of discrete choice model: { 1 iff X it β 1 γp it + ε 1it > Z it β 2 + ε 2it c it = 0 otherwise, where c it, indicates whether consumer i purchased Yoplait 150 on shopping trip t.

11 Econometric results Parameter Simple Logit Normal Random Effect Advertising*Inexperienced (1) ( ) (.77561) Advertising*Experienced (2) (Image & Prestige Effects) (.63504) ( ) (1) - (2) (Informative Effects)

12 Econometric results (2) An additional 30-second commercial every week for the average inexperienced consumer has the same effect to the purchase probability as a 10-cent price decrease. Advertising elasticity of demand for Yoplait 150 is around.15. The marginal effect of advertising is going down as a consumer s number of previous purchases increases.

13 Conclusions Yoplait 150 advertisements were influencing consumer behavior primarily by informing them about search and experience characteristics, not by creating prestige or associating the product with favorable images. This approach can fairly easily be applied to other products or industries.

14 Appendix Summary Statistics Figure: Summary Statistics.

15 Appendix Number of Shopping Trip Figure: Number of Shopping Trips.

16 Appendix Purchases Figure: Purchases.

17 Appendix Explanatory Variable Descriptive Statistics Figure: Explanatory Variable Descriptive Statistics.

18 Appendix Endogeneity Problem A consumer has a high initial intercept because she saw an advertisement or simply because she happened to like the brand Yoplait already? Instrumental Variable: of Mean advertising intensity.