Knowledge that Transforms

For most forms of conscious consumer choice, product attributes serve as the means that consumers use to accomplish their goals. Because there is competition between products in the marketplace, consumption decisions typically present conflict between means to achieve a goal. In this article, we examine the consequences of conflict between regulatory means on consumers’ decisions and show that its resolution depends on whether the means—that is, the attributes—are compatible with the consumer’s regulatory orientation. We show that compatibility with more than one attribute arouses acute decision conflict and evokes decision processes that result in a pronounced tendency to make counternormative choices. We also show that incompatibility with a product’s attributes leads to choosing extreme alternatives, which suggests the presence of a “pick-your-poison” effect. We test our hypotheses using the attraction, compromise, and deferral paradigms. We close by discussing our results in the context of the Lewinian view of decision conflict.

What is it about context that determines whether a target will be assimilated to the context or contrasted away from it? We suggest that it is the dimensional overlap in the range of values that contextual and target stimuli might take. Four experiments demonstrate that overlap or lack thereof between context and target ranges determines context effects. Assimilation occurs when the context and target ranges overlap, but contrast occurs when the ranges do not overlap. Furthermore, perceptions of amount of overlap or lack thereof determine the amount of assimilation or contrast. These results occur regardless of whether research participants are asked to explicitly consider ranges or not prior to judgment, whether the context consists of attributes or exemplars, and whether the target is novel or familiar.

People sometimes feel the effect of product consumption almost instantaneously-within an unrealistically short time after consumption. Such placebo-like effects are typically attributed to conditioning, motivation, or expectations about product efficacy. The present research shows such effects can also occur because, under some conditions, people are more prone to underestimate the time to onset of products they have used in the past. These recollections of too short a time to onset alter people's experience of products and cause them to report more rapid effects. Participants who were led to believe there was a strong causal link between having consumed a product and improved performance on a task recalled that less time elapsed before they experienced an effect. In subsequent consumption, they felt comfortable using the product later in time, started working on a similar task earlier upon use, experienced the product's effect sooner, and were less inclined to switch to competing products. (c) 2010 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..

Increased liking of one’s choice following difficult decisions (e.g., choosing between similarly attractive options) is well documented. Given the common mechanism proposed for this effect—a highly involving dissonance reduction process—it would be reasonable to expect such choice enhancement to be quite durable and resistant to later change. Instead, we show the contrary: that difficulty-driven choice enhancement is exceptionally fragile, collapsing easily against even minor attack. In three experiments, consumers make easy or difficult product choices, report attitudes toward their choice, and subsequently encounter a negative customer review. Compared to easy decisions, difficult decisions lead to more extreme initial positivity toward chosen products but also to more vulnerability to subsequent attack. Moreover, this fragile enhancement effect is exacerbated, not ameliorated, by choice involvement. Thus, making difficult decisions between similarly attractive options may motivate a bubble-like inflation of positivity that has some semblance of strength yet remains highly prone to collapse.

Previous research has shown that spacing of information (over time) leads to better learning of product information. We develop a theoretical framework to describe how massed or spaced learning schedules interact with different learning styles to influence product usage proficiency. The core finding is that with experiential learning, proficiency in a product usage task is better under massed conditions, whereas with verbal learning, spacing works better. This effect is demonstrated for usage proficiency assessed via speed as well as quality of use. Further, massed learning also results in better usage proficiency on transfer tasks, for both experiential and verbal learning. We also find that massed learning in experiential learning conditions leads not only to better usage proficiency but also to positive perceptions of the product. Overall, the pattern of results is consistent with a conceptual mapping account, with massed experiences leading to a superior mental model of usage and thus to better usage proficiency.

This research investigates the effect of a zero-value attribute on consumer choice. It is argued that a zero attribute removes a reference point that consumers use to evaluate the size of attribute differences. As a consequence, the shift from a number to zero can make an advantage (or disadvantage) that seemed large and clear in the presence of a reference point become less clear and thus less impactful when a reference point is removed. This leads to an interesting effect, whereby an option can improve its choice share by increasing the level of an undesirable attribute from zero or decreasing the level of a desirable attribute to zero. A series of four experiments provide supporting evidence for this new choice phenomenon.

In the present article, we propose that consumers’ initial effort investment in pursuing a goal may increase or decrease the value of the goal and the consumer’s subsequent motivation, depending on whether the pursuit of the goal is perceived to be one’s autonomous choice. When consumers perceive that the goal they pursue is adopted through an autonomous choice, the initial effort investment is experienced as reflecting the value of the goal; therefore, greater effort should increase the value of the goal as well as consumers’ subsequent motivation. Conversely, if consumers perceive that the goal has been imposed on them, they experience psychological reactance that is proportional to the amount of effort that they expend in pursuing the goal; thus, they devalue the goal as they invest more effort in its pursuit and show lower subsequent motivation.

An important issue in consumer behavior is whether affect created by low-level processes, such as evaluative conditioning, will influence brand choice when consumers have also been exposed to relevant product information. To examine this issue, in two experiments implicit attitudes were created by evaluative conditioning where the participants were unaware of the contingencies. This creates an “I like it, but I don’t know why” effect. The participants also had conflicting product information available in memory. We find that the participants rely on their implicit attributes when making a brand choice if they have not formed an explicit evaluation based on the product attribute information. This occurs even when the attribute information is available in memory and the participants are highly motivated to retrieve it. These findings provide evidence that implicit attitudes can have a significant influence on behavior, despite conflicting product information, and increased levels of motivation and opportunity.

The aficionado consumer is one who consumes and enjoys a hedonic product regularly but has failed to obtain product expertise from his/her many experiences. We conceptualize the aficionado as having asymmetric perceptual and conceptual knowledge and posit that when these two types of knowledge are bridged with a sensory consumption vocabulary, the aficionados are better able to learn from their experiences. In experiment 1, we find that providing aficionados a cross-modal learning tool (wine aroma wheel) during their tasting helps them strengthen their experiential memory and withstand influence from misleading marketing communications. We also find that when aficionados are presented with a misleading consumption vocabulary during their tasting, they more readily accept the marketing misinformation that results in memory distortion. In experiment 2, we find that accurate multisensory information delivered through either the wine aroma wheel or advertising can enhance how aficionados learn from their direct tasting experience.

How are price judgments influenced by the distribution of observed prices for other items in the same category? Processing goals will moderate price-judgment processes. When the processing goal is discrimination, price perceptions will be influenced by variations in range and ranks of prices in a distribution and contrast effects will be observed. For example, lowering the price of the lowest-priced product in a set will increase perceived expensiveness of higher-priced products. When the processing goal is generalization, however, price perceptions will be influenced by variations in the mean of the price distribution, in which case assimilation is observed. For example, lowering the price of the lowest-priced product in a set will decrease perceived expensiveness of higher-priced products. This latter finding is in sharp contrast to findings in the current literature on the effect of price structure on price judgments.