An empirical test of an updated relevance-accessibility model of advertising effectiveness

The Relevance-Accessibility Model provides a framework for studying advertising effects on brand choice. To do this, it shifts the focus of study from the time of advertising exposure to the time of brand choice. The model is motivationally based. Consumers' motivation to deliberate at the time of brand choice influences consumers' preferred choice process. Three choice processes; optimizing, satisficing and indifference, are associated with the preferred use of three different types of information: evidence of performance superiority, evidence of credibility and evidence of liking, respectively. The model predicts that an advertising message appeal is most likely to influence brand choice when it is both relevant and accessible. The message appeal that can most easily achieve the choice objective is the most relevant appeal. A message appeal is most likely to be accessible when consumer involvement at the time of advertising exposure Leads to its efficient encoding in memory. The major contributions of this paper are the updating of the model's theoretical framework and the empirical test of the model's predictions about message appeal effectiveness in different motivational scenarios.