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 mast 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.

Overview

The relevance-accessibility model (RAM) provides a framework for studying advertising effects on brand choice. The model shifts the focus of advertising effects research from the time of advertising exposure to the time of brand choice. This shift is necessitated by the knowledge that brand-related information and brand judgments, encoded at the advertising exposure occasion, may be neither relevant nor accessible at the time of brand choice (Baker 1993; Baker and Lutz 1988; Feldman and Lynch 1988; Keller 1993, 1991; Lynch, Marmorstein and Weigold 1988).

The contribution of this manuscript is threefold. First, it updates key propositions of the model. Exhibit 1 updates the key elements of three motivation driven choice processes: optimizing, satisficing and indifference (modified from Baker 1993). Figure 1 more specifically illustrates how brand response involvement and information accessibility (which is influenced by advertising message involvement), influence the choice process that consumers use at the time of brand choice. The concepts of advertising message involvement and brand response involvement have also been modified. They are now defined more in the context of their influence on the direction of consumer information processing (i.e., the type of information that consumers are motivated to attend) rather than simply the intensity of information processing. This more clearly relates the constructs to the model's optimizing, satisficing and indifferent choice processes.