The role of consumers’ visual attention stimuli in advertising: traditional and neuromarketing research perspectives

The paper is based on information which is a combination of store advertisement and consumers’ path inside the store along with product information. With this information, the authors find how advertisement affects the behavior of consumers when making the decision. The findings suggest that advertisement has a small impact on customers inside the stores. Null effect is determined, and one standard deviation in advertising has an impact on store traffic by 1.2%. But the impact at a lower end of the model is observed. One standard deviation in advertisement has impacted the store sales by 8.4%. Based on further data mining, the research has found that there is no significant improvement in the number of customers, but the increase in sales is because of the higher quantity of purchases by the existing consumers. However, the effect of advertisement on products placed in the same or nearby shelf is not found, the impact on product varieties in the same segment is also not found. Based on these research findings, the authors find the right approach towards advertisement.
The research is limited to consumers of retail industry in a Tier 3 Indian city of a developing geographic segment only.

Materialism has been given great attention in the consumer behavior literature. How materialistic tendencies are shaped by advertising has also been documented. Yet, the impact of consumers’ materialism on their perceptions of ads is not clearly understood. The goal of this research is to examine the relationship between an individual’s materialism and his/her perceptions of various kinds of advertising. Using four specific advertising appeals (i.e., interpersonal, prestige/status, achievement, and appearance-related), attitudes toward the ad, and thoughts elicited by the advertisement were measured and compared across high and low materialism groups. Significant differences were found between respondents from the two groups with respect to the evaluation of each type of appeal. When prestige/status, achievement, and appearance-related appeals were used in advertising, they were evaluated more favorably by consumers with high levels of materialism than by consumers with low levels of materialism. In contrast, advertising that used an interpersonal appeal was viewed more favorably by consumers with low levels of materialism. The results of this research provide implications for marketers on three perspectives: the furthering of our conceptualization of the materialism construct, the design of promotional communication for specific target markets, and the public policy dimension of targeting consumers more vulnerable to certain appeals.

Innovative marketing has given rise to practitioners’ and scholars’ attention in the 21st-century market. Given this, social media marketing has become the order of the day when accessing modern tools for marketing communication. However, the adoption of this innovation comes with its associated challenges, particularly, from a developing country perspective. Against this background, this study sought to examine the inhibitors characterized in the application of social media channels as an innovative tool for advertising and communication among SMEs (small and medium enterprises) in Ghana. For study results to be achieved, a quantitative research approach with a questionnaire of 650 was distributed among managerial staff of the fashion industry in the central part of Ghana of which 512 respondents were duly received and correctly filled for data processing and analysis. Results from the partial least square structural equation method (PLS-SEM), showed that despite the importance of innovation, lack of managerial skills/marketing expertise, perceived cost, regular systems/links upgrade, and financial constraints are significant inhibiting factors affecting the application of social media as advertising and communication tools among SMEs in developing economy. Interestingly, the findings further showed that ’company’s size’ as well as ’availability of social media channel/tool’ significantly control for the outcome variable (internet/social media) as a marketing communication tool.

Acknowledgment
This work is supported by Tomas Bata University in Zlin through; IGA/FaME/2019/002: The role of the institutional environment in fostering entrepreneurship, and further supported by IGA/FaME/2020/002 and IGA/FaME/2019/008. The authors are thankful to Prof. Jaroslav Belás, Prof. Boris Popesko, and Prof. Miloslava Chovancová for their guidance towards developing this manuscript.