2 3 A review and critique . of the hierarchy of effects in advertising

For close to a century, advertising and marketing researchers and practitioners the world over have diligently sought to understand just how advertising influences buyers' purchase decisions. At stake is the effectiveness of strategies developed in this multi-billion dollar industry. At the core of current understanding is the body of literature referred to as the hierarchy of effects. This literature deals with the way in which target audiences process and ultimately use advertising information to influence product and brand choices and is considered a top priority research area for contemporary marketing and advertising researchers (Schmalensee, 1983). One testimonial to the importance of the hierarchy of effects is the number of diverse communities interested in the topic. Among those interested are advertising and marketing researchers and practitioners, sociologists, communication theorists, cognitive psychologists, social psychologists and others who have debated the realities of advertising effects on consumption behaviour. A second testimonial to the importance of the hierarchy literature is its longevity. The first published suggestion that a hierarchy of effects was operative in marketing communications appeared in 1898 and researchers and practitioners continue to contest the hierarchy notion today. -Scores of hierarchyof-effects models have been proposed. The vast majority of them merely offer changes in nomenclature to the traditional hierarchy-of-effects model which hypothesizes that audiences respond to messages in a cognitive, affective, and conative (behavioural) sequence. More recently, however, researchers have begun to debate the existence of a single hierarchy sequence and have proposed alternativeorder hierarchy models. The purpose of this article is to review the large body of hierarchy literature that has accumulated over nine decades. The review first describes the traditional hierarchy models and is followed by a discussion of alternative-order hierarchy models. A critique of the evidence supporting the hierarchy proposition as a model of advertising effectiveness is then presented.