AN EMPIRICAL-EXAMINATION OF FACTUAL INFORMATION-CONTENT AMONG SERVICEADVERTISEMENTS

Services are generally thought to be less tangible to consumers than p hysical goods, a trait which may create communication difficulties for sellers of service products. To accommodate the special nature of ser vice products and the generally greater perceived risk associated with them, many scholars argue that services marketers need to stress fact ual information in their advertisements. While this perspective has be en advanced for years, little empirical research has been conducted to examine its adoption by practitioners. In this article we investigate the extent to which the advertisers of services emphasise specificall y suggested factual information cues in their messages. Over 17,000 ne wspaper ads and 9,800 television ads were scrutinized to reveal that s ervices advertisements do indeed provide various proposed factual cues and that their incidence increases as service products become more in tangible in nature.