Knowledge that Transforms

In a series of field studies, social and business events were promoted using humorous, non-humorous, and control formats. The humorous promotions significantly increased attendance for the social events, but showed no significant impact for business events.

Three experiments demonstrate that the allocation of subconscious resources during the processing of ads can influence the evaluation of the brand names or logos included in the ads. The evaluation of a brand name is shown to depend on its placement relative to the ad's focal information. Increases in brand name evaluation are attributed to matching activation--the elaborated processing of nonattended material in one hemisphere when the opposing hemisphere is the primary processor of the attended material. Implications for the design and layout of print ads and for the influence of advertising on purchase behavior are discussed. Copyright 1990 by the University of Chicago.

A sociocognitive perspective is developed to further the understanding of the relation between cognitive and social processes. The approach combines social network analysis with a cognitive network perspective to enable the researcher to study how social structure influences cognitive structure and how shared cognitive structure influences choice. This perspective is applied to how a group (with several subgroups) makes a consumer decision with consequences for the entire group. The results show that social structure influences cognitive structure, that shared knowledge is related to choice, and that the sociocognitive perspective provides new insights to prior literature on group decision making and the relation between group membership and brand choice.

This article begins with a partial replication of previous work—a comparison of the Values and Life Styles (VALS) system and the List of Values (LOV). The analysis is then extended to evaluate the role of a set of standard demographic variables with respect to both psychographic segmentation systems.

Shoplifting is a troubling and widespread aspect of consumer behavior, particularly among adolescents, yet it has attracted little attention from consumer researchers. This article reports and interprets findings on the pervasiveness of shoplifting among adolescents, the characteristics that distinguish adolescent shoplifters from their nonshoplifting peers, and adolescents' views regarding the reasons for this behavior. Our findings contradict some popular stereotypes concerning the typical shoplifter and suggest some rethinking about adolescents' reasons for shoplifting.

Extending the Warnerian tradition of social class dynamics, this article explores the attainment of secular immortality through affluence. A diverse set of literary media directed to or written about wealthy consumers was interpreted in a hermeneutic fashion to discern the dominant themes composing the ideology of affluence. Among the themes identified were entrepreneurial achievement, the achievement of celebrity status via consumption, and secular achievement in artistry and craftsmanship. The ideology of affluence was found to promote the seeking of personal secular immortality through the cultural celebration of achievement, wealth,and the accumulation of possessions. Copyright 1990 by the University of Chicago.

Two strategies for varying the content of ads over repeated presentations are distinguished, and the effectiveness of these strategies are examined at two different levels of consumer motivation to process the ads. Consistent with the hypotheses, experiment 1 found that a cosmetic variation strategy (variation in nonsubstantive features of an ad across multiple presentations) had greater impact on attitudes when motivation to process the ad was low (as induced by low personal relevance of the product). Experiment 2 found that a substantive variation strategy (variation in relevant product attributes across multiple presentations) was more influential when motivation to process the ad was high. These results are consistent with the Elaboration Likelihood Model of persuasion.

Among numerous possible reference prices, expected future price is important. A consumer's expectation of the future price of a brand plays a crucial role in the decision to buy now or later. Failure to characterize reference price as a forward-looking concept, a common practice in the reference pricing literature, violates premises of neoclassical economic theory and leads to questionable modeling applications. Explicit measures of future price expectations were obtained and used to test various models of expectations formation, providing insight into the effect of expected future price on consumers' responses to price promotions and brand choice decisions.

Studies of music in advertising have tended to characterize music as a nonsemantic, affective stimulus working independently of meaning or context. This implicit theory is reflected in methodology and procedures that separate music from its syntax of verbal and visual elements. Consequently, the consumer's ability to judge and interpret music as part of an overall rhetorical intention is overlooked. This article proposes an alternative theory--that music is meaningful, language-like--and calls for both interpretive and empirical research as ways of exploring a richer, potentially more explanatory concept. Copyright 1990 by the University of Chicago.

This study investigated one particular way that contextual materials can affect the processing of ambiguous product information in print ads. It was proposed that prior exposure to contextual factors can prime certain product attributes and subsequently increase the likelihood that consumers interpret product information in terms of these activated attributes, thereby affecting the evaluation of the adverised brand. Two experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis, and the results demonstrated that specific attributes relevant to evaluating the advertised brand varied in their acessibility as a function of the context and that these variations influenced brand attitudes. Copyright 1990 by the University of Chicago.