Communicator credibility, personality factors and customer responses to comparative advertising claims Available to Purchase

Pre‐existing data on the personality characteristics of a sample of 392 people and how these individuals rated persons who communicated to them a fictitious comparative claim were related to changes in subjects’ evaluations of two businesses before and after the transmission of the false statement. Results suggest that personality factors and the esteem in which the message communicator is held may affect customer responsiveness to comparative advertising. However, asymmetric reactions were observed: respondents were more likely to increase their ratings of the business alleged to be superior in the comparative claim than they were to reduce their evaluations of the other enterprise. The results are consistent with earlier studies which concluded that comparative advertising exerts significant effects on consumer behaviour and that comparative claims can influence consumer evaluations of competing businesses or brands, even when there are no objective differences between them.