Taken for a ride?

Two large, luxury sport utility vehicles. One ranks first in a comparison test; the other ranks last. The top-ranked costs $53,995, and the bottom-ranked costs $55,060. Choosing which to buy might look like a no-brainer.

Then why did the Hummer H2, which “didn’t impress” an editor at Edmunds.com, find its way into almost as many driveways as the Cadillac Escalade, ranked at or near the top in categories like “drive,” ride” and “design,” by the same site in 2003?

Two University student researchers think the answer might lie in how the SUVs were marketed. Ken Wilbur, a doctoral candidate in economics, and Matt Heitz (Economics ’06), a former student of Wilbur’s, are using a Double Hoo research grant to help them find and analyze the data that could support their hypothesis.

“We’ve been looking at the quality of the car and the advertising,” said Heitz. Are the ads emotional, with an SUV driving fast up a mountain? Or are they more factual?

General Motors “does a lot more advertising for the Hummer than the Escalade,” said Wilbur, who will join the University of Southern California faculty as an assistant professor of marketing in fall 2005. The U.Va. researchers are looking at how an SUV is advertised on television and whether the ads focus on the car’s features or on its emotional appeal.

They hypothesize that advertisements for high-quality cars would emphasis that quality, while lower-quality cars might be marketed by appealing to a consumer’s desire to be cool, for example.

Heitz worked long hours over the summer of 2004 reviewing tapes from the May 2003 prime-time television schedule. He recorded emotional arguments, the color of the cars and the gender and ethnicity of the people who appeared in the ads.

He found that Kia, a newer brand, was presented in ads that stressed the car’s reviews and safety rating, while the Hummer H2, a new model that already had an established identity, had much more emotional ads. “You’d see the car braking, going fast, going off road.”

One ad never even showed the Hummer. It depicted a soapbox derby in which a Hummer-type model car went off the track to win the race.

Looking at the age, gender and race of the actors in the ads “tells something about who the ad is targeted at,” said Wilbur. “The real bear part of this project is the data collection -- more so than comparable research in economics.”

The Double Hoo grant of $5,000 gave them “the luxury of time to do it right,” Wilbur added.  The idea for the SUV research grew out of a conversation Heitz had with Wilbur during office hours. “I couldn’t understand why people would be influenced to buy a car from a commercial,” said Heitz, who’s never bought a car himself. A computer science minor, he also has taken courses in media studies that were useful for analyzing the advertising.

Helping consumers be better informed about marketing strategy can help them make better decisions, said Heitz. Added Wilbur, “The point is whether emotional-based ads are credible.” If advertisements for low-quality products tend to make emotional appeals, he explained, “it tells you that when you see an emotional ad you shouldn’t pay attention.”

Studies like this could lead to changes in government regulation of advertising, he said.

“This is sort of a different study in economics, in that we did some content analysis, and we’re doing rigorous quantitative work with the content analysis data we generated,” said Wilbur. “It’s sort of blending a little from very disparate fields.”

There is still much data to be collected, and the question of a correlation between SUV quality and advertising remains to be answered, but a few trends have emerged:

• Newer SUVs tend to engage in more informative advertising than older SUVs.
• Emotion-based SUV ads typically described the car as cool, family-oriented, tough, exciting, sexy or some combination.
• The most commonly advertised characteristics include price, warranty, engine, available options, awards won and ability to go off road.
• Consumers depicted in SUV ads are almost always white, and the car is very frequently portrayed as urban transportation.
• SUV ads tend to air during family programming.

Wilbur and Heitz hope to have a working paper on their research by fall 2005.