When the product is complex, does the advertisement’s conclusion matter?

This study was made for two purposes. The first was to replicate the study of Sawyer and Howard (1991), which found that the effects of persuasion in open-ended advertisements were greater than those of closed-ended advertisements when the audience was involved in processing the ads. The second was to examine a potential boundary condition of these findings based on complexity of the product featured in the advertisement and the audience's ability to process the information. An experiment using 211 student subjects replicated the results of Sawyer and Howard when the same low-complexity product was featured in the target advertisement. However, the results of the analysis of variance (ANOVA) and logistic regression (LOGIT) analyses on four measures of persuasion (attitude toward the brand, effort, purchase intention, and choice) showed that the effects Sawyer and Howard found for their relatively simple product (razor) did not hold for a complex product (CD player) except for purchase intention. Further examination of the role of the subject's ability to process the complex product advertisement showed little difference from the overall group in the complex product condition.