JMO15310.1177/1522637913486092<italic>Journalism & Communication Monographs</italic>Beard 486092research-article2013 Monograph Journalism & Communication Monographs 15(3) 114 –216 A History of Comparative © 2013 AEJMC Reprints and permissions: Advertising in the sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1522637913486092 United States jcmo.sagepub.com Fred K. Beard1 Abstract This historical monograph addresses a gap in the extensive scholarly research literature devoted to comparative advertising—especially that which contrasts the advertised product, service, or brand with an identifiable competitor—by exploring advertisers’ explanations for its appeal as a tactic throughout the previous century. Prior historical research confirms advertisers have long been aware of and greatly concerned about the unintended consequences of what they often called excessively competitive and combative advertising. Moreover, despite some thirty-five years of systematic scholarly research, two research teams recently concluded that the state of empirical knowledge regarding its effectiveness remains “equivocal.” By synthesizing the extensive theoretical and empirical research literature on comparative advertising and interpreting those findings from a historical perspective, this monograph offers uniquely significant insights into modern advertising’s history, theory, and practice. Keywords comparative advertising, advertising history, advertising message strategy Comparative advertising—especially that which contrasts the advertised product or service with an identifiable competitor—has been a controversial topic among adver- tisers throughout the past one hundred years and remains so. Recent historical research suggests that such consequences as the tendency for advertisers to lose focus on their own message strategies, the creation of potentially misleading advertisements, legal challenges from competitors under the Lanham Trademark Act, and damage to adver- tising’s institutional veracity have often occurred when advertisers used comparative 1University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, USA Corresponding Author: Fred K. Beard, Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Oklahoma, 395 West Lindsey, Norman, Oklahoma 73019, USA. Email: [email protected] Downloaded from jmo.sagepub.com at UNIV OF OKLAHOMA on January 20, 2016 Beard 115 advertising, especially if they became engaged in advertising wars.1 Moreover, and despite some thirty-five years of systematic scholarly research, two independent research teams concluded not long ago that the state of empirical knowledge regarding its effectiveness remains “equivocal.”2 Industry concerns regarding comparative advertising and calls for its reform began to appear regularly during the Great Depression and peaked during one of the most contentious periods of advertising self-regulation, the 1970s. Comparative advertis- ing, in fact, set the stage for an extraordinary regulatory battle between the advertising industry and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) during the mid- to late-1970s. Advertisers were aware of and concerned about the unintended consequences of what they sometimes called excessively competitive and combative advertising throughout the previous century.3 These consequences help explain why surveys of contemporary advertising professionals confirm that despite its frequent use, they continue to retain a healthy skepticism toward comparative advertising’s effectiveness.4 Problems with comparative advertising also attracted the attention of media owners and managers. By the early-1930s, they were in near-unanimous agreement that com- parative advertising represented a serious business and regulatory problem, trapping many between two or more feuding patrons, frequently forcing advertising refusals and revisions to clearance policies, and threatening advertising revenue.5 Although comparative advertising was widely criticized by advertisers during the first half of the twentieth century, research confirms they did engage in it, especially during the lean years of the Great Depression.6 Richard Pollay,7 who content analyzed 2,000 magazine ads published between 1900 and 1980, reported that the generalized mention of competitive standing, or what is called “implied” comparative advertis- ing,8 was quite common, with an average of 25% across the decades. However, when Pollay operationalized comparative advertising as ads that included “clues” to the identity of competitors, or what is called “explicit” comparative advertising,9 the aver- age was only 2%. Pollay found the greatest frequency of use, at 4%, in the 1970s. Other researchers also report that explicit comparative advertising increased sig- nificantly during and after the 1970s in both broadcast and print media. Estimates of comparative ads as a percentage of all ads in the United States range from about 7%10 to 23%11 to between 30% and 40%.12 Researchers Linda Swayne and Thomas Stevenson found the percentage of comparative ads in business magazines increased from 8.1% in 1970 to 23.8% in 1985,13 and Fahad Al-Olayan and Kiran Karande report that 26% of their sample of U.S. general interest, family, and women’s maga- zines included comparisons.14 Estimates of the use of comparative advertising on television are higher, on aver- age, ranging from 5% to 10%15 to 14%16 to 50%17 to as high as 80%.18 Industry reports of comparative advertising frequency based on television network analyses also indi- cate a steady increase, ranging from 23%19 to 35%20 to as high as 50%.21 The number of comparative commercials on prime time television, according to Gallup & Robinson, soared from one out of thirty during the 1973 season to one out of twelve in 1975.22 Although there has been no recent content analysis of comparative advertising use, some industry observers suggest an increase during the first decade of the twentieth century.23 Downloaded from jmo.sagepub.com at UNIV OF OKLAHOMA on January 20, 2016 116 Journalism & Communication Monographs 15(3) There are several theoretical explanations for why the kinds of negative informa- tion often found in comparative ads could enhance their effectiveness. For instance, “negativity bias”24 predicts that negative information may have a greater effect in the decision-making process, compared with positive information. Researchers investi- gating political attack advertising propose this occurs because negative information is more unexpected and novel,25 less ambiguous,26 and more credible.27 Some of these effects likely occur because negative information is often presented, as it generally is in comparative product and service advertising, within a context that is predominantly positive.28 On the other hand, others suggest negative information encourages greater attention and recall because it appeals to emotion rather than logic29 and because peo- ple assign greater weight to negative information when making evaluations in social settings.30 Advertising’s most important theory, the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM),31 also offers a valuable framework for understanding comparative advertising and its effectiveness. The ELM proposes two routes to persuasion—one central and one peripheral. The central route predicts that when people are motivated to think about a message (e.g., they are highly involved or the message is especially relevant) and able to think about it (e.g., the message is fairly easy to understand), then they will cogni- tively elaborate on the claims in the ad and be persuaded by issue-relevant arguments. Negativity bias suggests that comparative ads containing claims and criticisms about competitors, especially identified ones, likely activate the central route to per- suasion, encouraging people to integrate the claims into their existing knowledge structures, leading to message acceptance and possibly long-term attitude change. On the other hand, since some people may be expected to counterargue with comparative ads as well as derogate the source,32 these could encourage negative thoughts, leading to rejection of the message. Conversely, the “distraction hypothesis”33 predicts that after a comparative ad gains people’s attention, they might be distracted from counter- arguing with the comparative claims and criticisms by peripheral cues, such as humor, music, or celebrity spokespersons. The result would be a weaker, temporary form of attitude change by way of the ELM’s peripheral route to persuasion. Academic researchers have devoted considerable attention to comparative advertis- ing. More than eighty studies on the topic were published in scholarly journals between 1975 and 1994.34 Many of these were likely among the seventy-seven studies Dhruv Grewal and his colleagues included in their widely cited meta-analysis.35 A search of the literature published since 1997 uncovered another fifty studies of comparative advertising. A review and synthesis of the findings and conclusions from Grewal et al.’s meta- analysis, John Rogers and Terrell Williams’s practitioner survey and literature review (forty-two studies), Fred Beard’s 2011 update of the Rogers and Williams survey, and the fifty studies of comparative advertising published since 1997 is presented in Table 1’s model.36 The model’s process outcomes (cognitive, affective, and conative) were cho- sen from the literature based on three criteria: (1) They are the outcomes most fre- quently investigated, (2) they are of theoretical significance, and (3) they are important to advertisers. Downloaded from jmo.sagepub.com