Deception from implied superiority claims in advertising: The case of combined comparatives

One of the goals of comparative advertising is to achieve a specific positioning for the sponsor brand. Competitive positioning may be achieved via an associative strategy but more often comparative ads are designed to emphasize differences between brands. With combined-comparative claims advertisers can achieve both association and differentiation from the competition. The cause for concern with combined comparatives is based on advertisers' misuse of this format to falsely suggest brand superiority. Recognizing the potential damage to their brands, advertisers are now legally challenging such claims.; The purpose of this dissertation is to identify instances when processing of combined-comparative claims leads to interpretive biases. The linguistic construction of such claims is predicted to lead to false attribute inferences and to inaccurate consumer perceptions of the comparison brands.; Study one investigates comparative claims that differ in specificity. A second study investigates combined comparatives of different directions (parity and superiority) and interpretive biases when these target different competitors.; Study one did not provide support for the hypothesized effects when the combined comparative consisted of puffery and negated parity claims. A majority of subjects recalled that the sponsor was superior to the parity brand on the depicted attribute, and very few subjects reported a parity comparison between the sponsor and the parity brand. However, there were no statistically significant differences due to the advertising copy manipulations.; Results from the second study supported the hypothesized effects. There were statistically significant effects of the advertising copy manipulation on subjects' recall of sponsor superiority over the parity brand. Significantly more subjects falsely recalled that the sponsor was superior on the depicted attribute when the parity claims were in negated parity form than when they were linguistically simplified. Moreover, the number of subjects who said the sponsor was superior to the parity brand increased with delay only in the negated parity condition. When the parity claim was simplified, significantly fewer subjects reported sponsor superiority. The ability of the simplified claims to convey the parity comparison persisted over time.