Participants estimated the attractiveness of vacations described in 2 travel brochures. The information about 1 vacation was conveyed in a narrative that described the sequence of events that would occur. In contrast, information about the other vacation was conveyed in an ostensibly unorganized list. Vacations were generally evaluated more favorably when they were described in a narrative than when their features were simply listed. Moreover, this difference increased when (a) negative features of the vacations were mentioned, (b) pictures accompanied the text information, or (c) recipients were encouraged to imagine themselves having the experiences described. Although narrative forms of information elicited more extreme affective reactions than list forms, this did not account for the difference in their effectiveness. Rather, the advantage of narratives was attributed to (a) their structural similarity to information acquired through daily life experiences and (b) the use of a holistic—as opposed to a piecemeal—strategy for computing judgments.

The cultural lens through which an ad is viewed can affect the extent to which an endorser of the product in an ad and the message s(he) communicates are thought about in relation to one another. Consumers with a collectivist mindset tend to think about information relationally. Consequently, they consider the endorsement in relation to the endorser and this affects their memory for both. It also affects recipients' concern with the fit between the endorser's message and the endorser and consequently influences their judgments of both the ad and the product being advertised. When people have an individualist mindset, on the other hand, they appear to treat the endorser and the endorsement as independent pieces of information and are less sensitive to their fit. Four studies support these conclusions and provide insights into how endorser–message relatedness impacts persuasion under different cultural mindset conditions.

Cognitive priming procedures were used to identify the unique effects that luck‐related concepts have on consumer behavior. The effects of these concepts could theoretically influence behavior through the elicitation of positive affect or via temporary changes in participants' self representations of how lucky they feel. An initial experiment showed that priming Asian consumers with lucky numbers independently influenced both their perceptions of personal luck and the positive affect they reported experiencing. Subsequent experiments, however, showed that the effect of these primes on consumer behavior was mediated by momentary changes in how lucky people felt (i.e. changes in the self concept) rather than by the positive affect they were experiencing at the time. Exposing consumers to lucky numbers influenced their estimates of how likely they were to win a lottery (Experiment 2), their willingness to participate in such a lottery (Experiment 4), their evaluations of different promotional strategies (Experiment 3), and also the amount of money they were willing to invest in different financial options (Experiment 4). The effect of luck on behavior was also moderated by a person's regulatory focus.

We show that an extremely high‐priced product featured among more moderately priced products within a catalog can increase the reservation price for a moderately priced target product as well as the category as a whole. We investigate how this increase is influenced by the degree of relatedness between the extreme‐priced product and the target as well as the situational and temporal proximity (contiguity) in their presentation. Consistent with our conceptualization, we find that the presence of an extreme cue leads to greater changes in target reservation price when the extreme‐priced referent and target are more related and are contiguously presented. Furthermore, the impact of an extreme‐priced product's relatedness on reservation price appears to be greater when the contiguity between the extreme‐priced product and the target product is high versus when it is low.