Caso Saturn

AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION OF THE INTERACTION BETWEEN PUBLICITY,
ADVERTISING, AND PREVIOUS BRAND ATTITUDES AND KNOWLEDGE
Claire Stammerjohan, Charles M. Wood, Yuhmiin Chang, and Esther Thorson
ABSTRACT; Marketing practitioners and advertising firms have increasingly embraced an integrated marketing
communications (IMC) approach to their promotional efforts in order to achieve direct effectsof the individual
communication tool used, as well as an additional "synergistic" effect from the combination of communications tools
used. The present study is designed to fill a gap in the marketing literature by using a controlled experimental design to
assess and compare the individual and combined influences of two IMC tools—publicity and advertising—on attitude
toward the ad (A j) andattitude toward the brand (A^). The study also looks for synergies from the use of multiple media
(radio and print). Findings show that the combined effects of these IMC tools on A^^and A^are not identical, and that
there are complex interactions between media, brand familiarity, and the valence of news stories.

Integrated marketing communications (IMC) has been described as a natural and"inevitable" result of progress in promotional tools and convergence in media (Schultz 1996). Over
the past decade, advertising agencies have adopted the IMC
approach as both a sound practice and a source of added revenue. In addition, brand managers instinctively like the idea
of a unified brand image and getting more "bang" for their
buck (Cook 1997; Novelli 1989; Lemon and Nowlis 2002).
Thecumulative impact and interplay of different communication tools (i.e., "synergy") is not well understood, however.
This is surprising given the widespread acceptance of the practice and promises of the IMC approach. Prior research has
examined synergies resulting from the use of multiple media in a campaign (e.g., Bhargava and Donthu 1999; Chang
and Thorson 2004; Naik and Raman 2003), but fewstudies
have empirically examined the interplay of advertising, sales
promotion, publicity, direct marketing, and personal selling to see whether using multiple promotional tools results
in synergy—a positive response to a campaign that is greater
than the sum of separate expected responses based on use of

Claire Stammerjohan (Ph.D., Mississippi State University) is an
assistant professor inthe Department of Management and Marketing at Jackson State University.
Charles M. Wood (Ph.D., University of Missouri) is an assistant
professor of marketing in the Management and Marketing Department, University of Tulsa.
Yuhmiin Chang (Ph.D., University of Missouri) is an assistant professor of marketing in the Department of Advertising and Public
Relations, Graduate School of MassCommunication, Fu Jen Catholic University, Taiwan.
Esther Thorson (Ph.D., University of Minnesota) is associate dean
of the Journalism School, University of Missouri.

each communication tool. Representing an early, exploratory
contribution to this stream, the research reported here examines how publicity for a firm (both positive and negative) affects consumer response to a company's advertisingmessages.
Under the domain of public relations, publicity is recognized as an efficient, credible means of communication. Firms
do not have complete control over the type of publicity that
consumers see, however, and publicity about a company can
be negative. For example. Ford, Firestone, and Enron have
faced a worldwide airing of negative publicity regarding their
products and practices.Unfortunately for Firestone, the negative publicity about some of its tires coincided with its launch
of a multimillion-dollar ad campaign celebrating "100 years
of reliability." Needless to say, in the face of the negative stories about its products, Firestone scrapped the ad campaign.
It has been proposed that Firestone believed that the campaign might only remind consumers about the negative...