A New Cornell Quarterly Article Explains How Businesses Can Build Consumers' Affection.
The false accusation last year that Wendy's had served tainted chili damaged company sales for many months afterward. Wendy's tried to bounce back with a sales promotion, with mixed results. Instead, the company might better have invoked warm, nostalgic memories to bring customers back, according to an article published in the May 2006 edition of the Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly (CQ).
The article examines the use of autobiographical advertising and reconstructive memory to rekindle customers' affection for a product. Written by Kathryn A. Braun-LaTour, Michael S. LaTour, and Elizabeth F. Loftus, the article, 'Is That a Finger in My Chili?: Using Affective Advertising for Post-crisis Brand Repair,' is available at no charge as the featured CQ article from the Cornell University Center for Hospitality Research (www.chr.cornell.edu).
Wendy's sales continued to suffer even after it was demonstrated that the claim of tainted chili was totally false. Seeing that Wendy's campaign offering a free Frosty did not restore customer traffic, LaTour and her coauthors tested another type of advertisement, a more 'affective' autobiographical ad, which referenced childhood experiences at Wendy's. Additionally, the study shows that advertising can be used to reconstruct memories that may not have actually occurred. The autobiographical ad featured an image and text of a 'Wendy's Playland.' Since it is McDonald's that is the proprietor of Playland, any mention of 'Wendy's Playland' on subsequent questionnaires shows the advertising influenced respondents' memory. Indeed, some respondents did 'recall' playing at Wendy's as a child.
The authors are not suggesting that companies present untrue information in their advertisements, but instead are demonstrating how people use present-day cues to recall past events. Most important to companies that are trying to recover from unfavorable publicity, the authors found that respondents who saw the autobiographical advertisement said that they held warmer feelings for Wendy's. In contrast, respondents who saw the chain's actual response to the incident, offering the free Frosty, neither recalled playing at Wendy's nor felt any more affection for the chain.
The article, which is now posted at http://www.hotelschool.cornell.edu/publications/hraq/feature/, was published in the May 2006 issue of the (CQ ), the premier journal of applied research serving hospitality practitioners and scholars.
The award-winning CQ is published by The Center for Hospitality Research at the Cornell School of Hotel Administration. Subscriptions are available from Sage Publishing (sagepublications.com). For more information on the CQ, see: http://www.hotelschool.cornell.edu/publications/hraq/.
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- Jeffrey Summers
- I am the expert you call when you need to learn how to increase top line sales, lower your operating costs, increase your profit margin, hire and train better managers and staff, evolve your operation into more and better ways of doing business, buy or sell a restaurant, improve your service, engineer (or re-engineer!) your menu, market your business better and less expensively, keep yourself from going nuts because you have no life anymore, open more and better restaurants, don't want to have to give up your first born child to pay a consultant and have more fun! My mission is to enhance the quality of life for my clients by providing the best products and services to help them achieve their personal and professional goals. I take great pride in my clients, my company, my commitment to service and the products I sell. I am a recognized expert in the hospitality industry with over 24 years of success at planning and executing strategies for delivering dramatic results, a former "GM of the Year" for 2 major, full-service, franchises, an Award winning Multi-Unit Executive with 2 of the largest restaurant chains in the U.S., published author, husband and father of two.