An Investigation of Visualization and Documentation Strategies in Services Advertising

Abstract

This study examines two advertising strategies— documentation and visualization—on several measures of ad effectiveness across two different types of service offerings (utilitarian and hedonic). For both service types, a visualization strategy was found to have a positive effect on informativeness, perceived quality, and likelihood of use (but had no effect on uniqueness). As expected, the documentation strategy had a positive effect on all of the dependent measures within the hedonic service environment but had no effect in the utilitarian setting. This is consistent with dual processing theories and suggests that individuals are more attentive to various forms of documentary information (e.g., statistics, figures, charts, testimonials, comparisons) when the service offering provides hedonic value.