Posts tagged CU study
CU study: Covert product placements in TV shows works Well, du…
Sep 23rd
“Frankly, we were a bit surprised at the power of covert marketing across a variety of studies,” said Margaret C. Campbell, professor of marketing at CU-Boulder’s Leeds School of Business and lead author of the article appearing online this month in the Journal of Consumer Psychology. “Even though most U.S. consumers know that marketers pay to surreptitiously get their brands in front of consumers, consumers are still influenced by covert marketing efforts.”
However, the studies also found that the disclosure of paid product placements in a sitcom decreased the influential effects, especially when the disclosure occurred after the consumer was exposed to the marketing.
In one of the studies, people watched a sitcom including a few seconds of exposure to a breakfast cereal. Later, when asked to list the first cereals that came to mind, people who had seen a brand name cereal during the sitcom were more than three times as likely to include that cereal in their top three, as compared with those who had seen a fictitious cereal. They also reported a much higher preference for the brand.
However, if prior to watching the show people saw a disclosure that sponsored product placements were included, they were not more likely to list the brand in their top three, although they still reported a higher liking for the brand.
If people saw a disclosure after the show that sponsored product placements were included, they also were not more likely to list the brand in their top three. But they did not report more favorable attitudes toward the brand, compared with a time when they had not been exposed to the product placement.
“Disclosures after the placement appear to alert people to the impact that covert marketing efforts can have, in which case they are less likely to be influenced,” Campbell said.
There have been calls to require disclosure of covert marketing in the U.S. to be consistent with other requirements for disclosure of sponsorship. Other countries, such as the Netherlands, home country of study co-author Peeter Verlegh of the University of Amsterdam, already require some disclosure.
Gina Mohr of Colorado State University also is a co-author.
“In the U.S. there has been some reluctance to incorporate disclosures for fear that it may interfere with creative content,” said Mohr. “This research suggests that product placement disclosures need not occur at the time of product placement to be effective.”
According to the authors, the findings provide support for the idea that requiring disclosure after exposure to covert marketing would offer consumers information to help them choose how to navigate the marketplace.
“Consumers should get to know when they are being exposed to commercial persuasion so they can decide how they want to respond,” said Campbell.
To view the study visit http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1057740812001337. For more information on CU-Boulder’s Leeds School of Business visit http://leeds.colorado.edu.
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CU study: Soot suspect in mid-1800s Alps glacier retreat
Sep 2nd
The research, published Sept. 2 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may help resolve a longstanding scientific debate about why the Alps glaciers retreated beginning in the 1860s, decades before global temperatures started rising again.
Thomas Painter, a snow and ice scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., is lead author of the study, and co-authors include Waleed Abdalati, Director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Glacier records in the central European Alps dating back to the 1500s show that between 1860 and 1930, loosely defined as the end of the Little Ice Age in Europe, large valley glaciers in the Alps abruptly retreated by an average of nearly 0.6 mile (1 kilometer). Yet weather in Europe cooled by nearly 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) during that time. Glaciologists and climatologists have struggled to understand the mismatch between the climate and glacier records.
“Something was missing from the equation,” Painter said.
To investigate, he and his colleagues turned to history. In the decades following the 1850s, Europe was undergoing a powerful economic and atmospheric transformation spurred by industrialization. Residents, transportation, and perhaps most importantly, industry in Western Europe began burning coal in earnest, spewing huge quantities of black carbon and other dark particles into the atmosphere.
When black carbon particles settle on snow, they darken the surface. This melts the snow and exposes the underlying glacier ice to sunlight and relatively warm air earlier in the year, allowing more and faster melt.
To determine how much black carbon was in the atmosphere and the snow when the Alps glaciers began to retreat, the researchers studied ice cores drilled from high up on several European mountain glaciers. By measuring the levels of carbon particles trapped in the ice core layers and taking into consideration modern observations of the distribution of pollutants in the Alps, they could estimate how much black carbon was deposited on glacial surfaces at lower elevations, where levels of black carbon tend to be highest.
The team then ran computer models of glacier behavior, starting with recorded weather conditions and adding the impact of lower-elevation black carbon. By including this impact, the simulated glacier mass loss and timing finally were consistent with the historic record of glacial retreat, despite the cool temperatures of the time.
“This study uncovers some likely human fingerprints on our changing environment,” Abdalati said. “It’s a reminder that the actions we take have far-reaching impacts on the environment in which we live.”
“We must now look closer at other regions on Earth, such as the Himalaya, to study the present-day impacts of black carbon on glaciers,” said Georg Kaser, a study co-author from the University of Innsbruck and lead author of the Working Group I Cryosphere chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s upcoming Fifth Assessment Report.
Other institutions participating in the study include the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the University of California, Davis.
CIRES is a joint institute of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and CU-Boulder.
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CU study: Conservation efforts might encourage some to hunt lions
Aug 26th
Further, some conservation initiatives including those designed to save lions from being hunted have either failed to work or in some cases appear to have incited Maasai to hunt more lions as a form of political protest, the researchers report.
Such nuances are important, because it’s harder to control the hunting of lions unless society knows precisely why lions are hunted, the researchers contend.
Many populations of Panthera leo—African lions—are falling, and the species is classified as “vulnerable” on the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources’ Red List.
Lion hunting is outlawed in Kenya and in Tanzania is limited to mostly tourists hunting with permits, unless the hunt is to eliminate a lion in defense of life or livestock. Still, lion hunting regularly occurs in both countries, usually without the hunters’ following the law.
“We saw an inaccurate representation of the exact reasons for why Maasai hunt lions, and we had a lot of ethnographic background to correct that,” said Mara J. Goldman, the assistant professor of geography at CU-Boulder who led the study.
Goldman collaborated with Joana Roque de Pinho, a postdoctoral researcher at the Instituto Superior de Ciencias Sociais e Politicas (Universidade Técnica de Lisboa, Portugal), and Jennifer Perry, a CU-Boulder geography alumna now studying law at the university.
Goldman and her fellow researchers conducted 246 in-depth interviews of Tanzanian and Kenyan Maasai between 2004 and 2008. They found that Maasai hunt lions for multiple overlapping reasons, some relating to predation on livestock and some not.
In some cases, Maasai said they hunted lions to prevent the potential killing of livestock, especially by lions that had killed livestock before, rather than just as retaliation.
And while Maasai still celebrate successful lion hunts and the prowess of the warriors who hunt, that cultural tradition can be less of a motivation to hunt than political discontent.
In Kenya, for instance, conservation programs aim to curb Maasai lion hunting by financially compensating Maasai for livestock killed by lions. In Tanzania, suggestions have been made by some to start such ‘compensation’ programs, but the Maasai themselves explain why this strategy has limitations:
“We cannot agree (to compensation) because we do not have cattle to be killed every day,” an elder Maasai told the researchers. “If they pay money today, then tomorrow, they will pay every day because the lion will keep coming back to eat cattle until all the cattle are gone. And then what will we do with the money?”
These sentiments were expressed in a village bordering the Manyara Ranch, a Tanzanian conservation trust on which hunting is prohibited but over which Maasai from neighboring villages are meant to share governance. In the beginning, the elders kept the warriors from hunting lions, the researchers found.
But after Maasai representation in ranch governance was diminished, the Maasai felt disenfranchised. Lion hunting increased in frequency and severity and was no longer discouraged by elders, the researchers said.
“We have no reason to follow the rules,” one elder told the researchers.
Goldman researches human-environment relations with the Tanzanian and Kenyan Maasai, one of the most recognizable ethnic groups in Africa, known for their distinctive, colorful dress and social customs, and most recently for their lion-hunting practices.
Although the primary motivations for lion hunting differed somewhat between Tanzania and Kenya, the researchers emphasize that Maasai have multiple, overlapping reasons to hunt lions: to reaffirm the protective role of young warriors, to help select brave leaders among warrior groups, to allow individual warriors to gain prestige, to eliminate lions that prey on livestock and to prevent lions from becoming habituated to eating livestock and sometimes harming people.
The multiple reasons illustrate the limitations of explaining Maasai lion hunting “as either a cultural manhood ritual or a retaliatory act,” the researchers write.
“Participatory conservation interventions that respect Maasai knowledge and promote full engagement with management processes are likely to have far better success in persuading Maasai to change or moderate such behaviors themselves,” the research team states, adding that “lion conservation projects rarely address such complex politics.”
Goldman, also a faculty research associate at CU-Boulder’s Institute of Behavioral Science, is the first author on the study that was recently published online in the journal Oryx and is scheduled to appear in the journal’s October print edition. The study is available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0030605312000907.
For more on this story, see Colorado Arts & Sciences Magazine at http://artsandsciences.colorado.edu/magazine.
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