This chapter discusses an emerging model with much potential to elucidate the processing and effects of narrative advertising, namely, the Transportation-Imagery Model (TIM). The TIM, by illuminating additional routes to persuasion beyond the two identified by the Elaboration Likelihood Model, seeks to explain the mental processing in narrative-based belief change. This chapter starts with a summary of major research findings on narrative persuasion, and then delineates the basic components, mechanism, and consequences of narrative persuasion via transportation. In addition, we have discussed message, individual, and environmental factors that could influence each of the three antecedents of transportation as well as transportation in general. Directions for future research on further refinement of the model are also provided.

This study examines the influence of self-congruity and product involvement on advertising responses. In addition to three traditional advertising responses, attitude-toward-the-ad, brand interest, and purchase intention, this study also examines participants' affective responses (arousal and valence) and their relationships with other advertising responses. The results indicated that while a higher degree of product involvement generated more positive responses toward the product information, within the same product category participants reported more positive emotional responses, more positive attitude-toward-the-ad, stronger brand interest, and stronger purchase intention toward self-congruent brands. Valence and arousal were found to be significantly correlated with attitude-toward-the-ad, brand interest, and purchase intention.

This research undertakes two related studies to investigate the difficulties faced and costs incurred by consumers in order to remove information about themselves from online white page directories. These directories contain an aggregate of personal information and create threats to consumers by allotting easy access. A survey study examines consumer awareness of these online directories and expectations of opt-out procedures. A field study tracks attempts at actual information removal for twenty volunteers to provide a real-world assessment of the effectiveness of current opt-out mechanisms. The results reveal a dramatic misalignment between consumer expectations and the reality of current opt-out practices. The results highlight the costs and difficulties associated with opt-outs and bring the validity of these mechanisms into question.

This paper reviews research from the special session on Privacy Research and Educational Issues at the 2010 Direct/Interactive Marketing Research Summit by providing summaries of the three presentations and offering related classroom activities. These presentations focused on aspects of information exchange in an online environment and illustrated the motivations and complexities individuals face in regards to online information disclosure choices. The classroom exercises developed from this research allow students to consider the management of their own information in an attempt to learn valuable lessons concerning the importance of awareness, management and persistency as they transition from students to advertising professionals.

An "information privacy gap" exists in marketing education, with little research addressing the state of information privacy and how appropriate privacy strategies and tactics should be communicated to students. The primary purpose of this article is to provide educators an understanding of information privacy and how they can incorporate this evolving and important topic into the marketing curriculum. To accomplish this goal, a comprehensive information privacy framework is presented, and specific recommendations are provided to assist marketing educators in their efforts to expand consumer information privacy issues in their courses.

This paper examines the effect of privacy concerns on purchase likelihood. In many consumer-seller relationships, consumers are required to provide personal information to marketers in order to get better service. The law requires that marketer provide a statement of their privacy policies to consumers. Secondary disclosure is a key aspect of privacy policies. Consumers are concerned about giving up privacy, but the impact of such concerns on purchase behavior is unclear. By integrating several marketer-controlled variables like price, product, and channels with a marketer’s secondary disclosure policy, the study measures the relative importance of the latter along with the effects of secondary disclosure and internet attitudes. The results show that secondary disclosure attitudes influence the weight of secondary disclosure policies in purchase situations. The results also indicate that price sensitivity is influenced by secondary disclosure policies. The clear implications are that privacy concerns do matter and that privacy policies and marketing strategies cannot be set in isolation of each other. The findings are discussed in relation to prior research on privacy and future research directions. Statistical techniques used in the paper include structural equation models, conjoint analysis, and simultaneous equation regression.

Although online consumer privacy has been an important issue in the commercial realm for more than a decade, nonprofit organizations (NPOs, or nonprofits, for short) have just begun to address the topic recently. No published scholarly research has examined the online information practices of the largest NPOs with regard to privacy and security issues. The absence of data leaves one unable to empirically gauge the extent of NPO compliance with the Federal Trade Commissions (FTCs) suggested information practices. Such an investigation would be useful not only to US nonprofits but also non-US nonprofits that are reaching US donors via their web sites.This study examines the online information practices of The Nonprofit Times 100 web sites and compares their practices to that of their commercial counterparts. The NPO web sites were found to collect just as much, and in some cases even more, personally identifying information as the commercial sites. The NPO web sites were more likely to display a privacy disclosure and privacy seal. Of critical concern, and not assessed in the commercial samples, is that nearly all of the NPO sites post personally identifying information (of individuals who are not employees).The current study provides benchmarks useful for assessing security issues pertaining to the collection, use, and even posting of personal information for NPO web sites. It also proposes actions for improving online security and privacy with the hope of encouraging more discussion of these important issues within the NPO community. Copyright (C) 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This article puts forth a framework for understanding critical consumer information privacy issues in direct and interactive marketing that consists of three broad dimensions: (1) multiple publics, (2) information channel developments, and (3) the publics' responses to privacy actions. Within this structure, the authors review and integrate existing research and issues, and identify an agenda for future research.

OBJECTIVE:A 3-yr study funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services was conducted to identify potential barriers to and opportunities for increasing the number hospitals with donation after cardiac death (DCD) protocols, the support of DCD by individuals involved in the donation request process, and the number DCD donors recovered. This study reports the qualitative findings.DESIGN:Methods used included an advisory committee and an extensive array of key informant interviews and focus groups.SETTING:Hospitals and telephone contact.SUBJECTS:Discussions with nurses, physicians, social service staff, clergy, administrators, and organ procurement organization staff. A total of 216 people participated.INTERVENTIONS:Collection and analysis of information regarding perceptions of DCD, potential barriers and opportunities, and strategies for gaining support.MEASUREMENT AND MAIN RESULTS:Key barriers included a lack of knowledge about DCD, psychological barriers for DCD vs. brain death, concerns about whether death has been reached, saving vs. killing patients, trust in the organ procurement organization, moving from saving patients to being a donation advocate, and concerns with the DCD process. Opportunities included education initiatives, well-trained requesters, a cultural shift, a consistent DCD protocol separating care from recovery, process monitoring, and a strong sense of teamwork.CONCLUSIONS:Our findings provide a better understanding of healthcare professionals' knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors regarding DCD. Understanding these issues is critical to the implementation of strategic plans for DCD programs. One of the biggest barriers to overcome is a lack of knowledge of DCD, which leads to misperceptions, which in turn contribute to negative attitudes and/or discomfort by healthcare professionals. Communication efforts that are able to educate healthcare professionals and eliminate misperceptions will increase support for DCD. Key to future success requires confident and well-trained DCD requesters.

This case report focuses on the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics Organ Procurement Organization (UWHC-OPO) efforts to produce a verifiable and demonstrable increase in organ donations by developing a replicable, transferable and feasible model intervention for increasing health care professionals' support for donation after cardiac death (DCD). A grant from the US Department of Health and Human Services funded a 3-year study allowing the UWHC-OPO to (i) identify barriers to and opportunities for increasing DCD support among those involved in the donation request process, (ii) implement this better understanding of these support factors in the creation of intervention materials designed to increase knowledge of and support for DCD and finally (iii) to track and document the progress made in increasing knowledge, support, number of hospitals with DCD protocols, actual requests made and number of DCD donors. The results of the model intervention were extremely positive, showing lasting increases in DCD knowledge and support, adoption of DCD protocols and referrals in the two tracking survey stages following the intervention. Perhaps most notably, DCD donor numbers within the UWHC-OPO region increased 93% in the year following the intervention and 179% to date.

Extending previous research, this work examines the advertising literature published in 2002–05, identifies research streams among most-cited works, and presents a co-citation network. Beyond what the citation analysis suggests about advertising research today, comparing the findings to earlier results provides insight into the intellectual development of the field, including shifts in scholarly orientations. Although advertising scholarship is historically sound, dynamic, increasingly diverse, and largely self-sufficient, the field has yet to move to a level of maturity where it can work off its “own,” rather than “borrowed,” theory.

Findings are reported from a US Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) funded study to identify barriers to increasing support for donations after cardiac death by health professionals. A donations after cardiac death (DCD) acceptance model is conceptualized and tested via 806 survey responses from certified requestors, all of whom had their identities protected through Institutional Review Board (IRB) protocol. The overall model was significant and explained 35% of the variation in DCD support. Greater knowledge about DCD, greater trust in the organ procurement organization (OPO) and a belief that futility has been reached were all positively associated with DCD acceptance. Negative perceptions of DCD versus brain death, transitioning from caregiving to donation advocate, concerns about the DCD process and the idea that DCD leads to active participation in the death reduced its support. The three greatest impediments to support of DCD exist when health professionals feel they are playing an active role in killing the patient, that a state of death has not yet been reached, and that DCD has more psychological barriers than does the brain death donation process. Opportunities and strategic initiatives are discussed to overcome these barriers, including the value of communication and education initiatives and the need for well-trained requestors. The implementation of these strategic guidelines helped to increase the number of DCD donors by 225%.

This study compares the informativeness and the appeals used in magazine advertising in China with those used in France and in the United States. It provides international marketers with a snapshot of current magazine advertising tactics and provides scholars with an assessment of how consistently expectations based on seminal cross-cultural research predict the informativeness and the appeals used in magazine advertising in each country. Surprisingly, the expectations based on the literature were most often inconsistent with the observations. These findings should serve as a reminder to international marketing scholars that the seminal cross-cultural works, as useful as they are in providing cultural insights, were never intended to apply equally to all subgroups (e.g., the Little Emperors) within a culture.

ABSTRACT Although viral marketing has garnered a great deal of attention in the trade press, almost nothing is known about the motivations, attitudes, and behaviors of the people (those sending the email to others) that constitute the essential component of any such strategy. This article reports the results of three studies that examine consumer responses and motivations to pass along email. Implications for target selection and message creation are discussed for advertising practitioners interested in implementing viral efforts, and suggestions for future research relating to computer-mediated consumer-to-consumer interactions are presented for academic researchers.

This study explores relationships among several factors that may influence the persuasive power of online consumer-to-consumer communication. The results call into question the assumption that consumer remarks posted on an independent online forum will automatically be more persuasive than remarks posted on a corporate website. Instead, the findings suggest that reactions to consumer-generated product reviews are moderated by receiver characteristics such as product involvement and experience with offline consumer-to-consumer communication.

The authors examine online privacy and security issues in a study of 102 church Web sites throughout the nation and find that though church Web sites collect personal identifying information comparable to that collected by commercial Web sites, few offer information practice statements or privacy policies. Furthermore, unlike their commercial counterparts, church Web sites often post personal identifying information of their members and site visitors that enhances potential threats to both consumer privacy and security. Survey responses from 21 church Web site administrators provide further insight into this information disclosure gap and potential means of addressing it.

Direct marketers use the information available in public records as they develop market, message, and media strategies. However, as consumers have become increasingly concerned about the perceived invasion of privacy such tactics constitute, these concerns have begun to be felt in the legal arena. This paper examines the legal environment regarding marketers’ access to and use of public records, including both statutory and constitutional law. The paper also reports the results of a public opinion survey that explored respondents’ attitudes toward marketets’ use of public records. Finally, the paper predicts a future filled with increasing legislative activity aimed at reducing marketers’ access and use of public records and explains why certain types of laws are most likely to survive (or fail) court scrutiny.