An Examination of Service Advertising Effectiveness

Due to their unique nature that distinguish services from goods, it is widely accepted in the academic community that services require to be advertised differently. Accordingly, specific approaches to advertise services have been proposed in literature. Set in India, this study examines the effectiveness of select service advertising execution styles: documentation, physical representation and visualisation as well as appeals in advertising services: emotional and rational. Further, type of services: experiential and utilitarian which has emerged as an important contextual factor in service advertising research has also been considered. The study findings demonstrate the effectiveness of the service advertising execution styles and appeals in terms of customer's attitude towards service provider and purchase intentions. The study also brings forth results that conflict findings of prior research mostly conducted in the U.S. and U.K. thereby showing that past research cannot be generalised to other contexts such as in India.