Knowledge that Transforms

Evidence suggests that some consumers react to promotion signals without considering relative price information. We adopt Petty and Cacioppo's Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) to explain this behavior in terms of the ELM's peripheral route to persuasion in which the promotion signal is taken as a cue for a price cut. Experimental results show that low need for cognition individuals react to the simple presence of a promotion signal whether or not the price of the promoted brand is reduced, but that high need for cognition individuals react to a promotion signal only when it is accompanied by a substantive price reduction.

Propositions regarding consumers' differential skepticism for search, experience, and credence claims are tested in an experiment using adult consumers. The results provide clear support for Nelson's (1970) hypotheses that consumers are more skeptical of experience than search attribute claims and more skeptical of subjective than of objective claims. No support is found, however, for the Darby and Kami (1973) hypothesis that consumers will be more skeptical of credence than of experience attribute claims or for the hypothesis that consumers will not be less skeptical of experience claims for low-priced goods.

An existential-phenomenological description of everyday consumer experiences of contemporary married women with children is offered. An idiographic case study provides a thick description of this phenomenon and illustrates the hermeneutic process used in the interpretation. Following the case study, three interpretive themes are presented as mutually related aspects of an experiential gestalt that is shaped by the contextual ground of participants' life-world situations. Viewed holistically, the thematic aspects exhibit several dialectical relations that can be understood in terms of the emergent meaning of free choice. The applicability of this experiential gestalt to other life-world contexts is discussed.

This article reports the results of a study meant to portray a detailed picture of self-gift experiences in four contexts, focusing notably on reward and therapeutic self-gifts. Extending prior conceptual discussions, the findings suggest that self-gifts are a form of personally symbolic self-communication through special indulgences that tend to be premeditated and highly context bound. Discussion centers on theoretical implications and future directions for self-gift research. Overall, self-gifts represent a complex class of personal acquisitions that offer intriguing insights on self-directed consumer behavior.

This study demonstrates the facilitating effect of positive mood on brand attitudes for readers of print advertising and explores contingencies and cognitive processes underlying that effect. Mood appears to affect the amount of total cognitive elaboration, bias the evaluation of argument quality, and peripherally affect brand attitudes. An experiment using print ads reveals that positive moods create less elaboration, which results in more heuristic processing and reduces the extent to which message evaluation—itself favorably influenced by positive moods—mediates brand attitudes. The effect is greater when the reader has a low need for cognition and when the ad contains weak message arguments.

Through a field study of 299 men and women, the effect of gender-related variables on Christmas-gift-shopping patterns was explored. Survey results suggest that women are more involved than men in the activity. However, men are likely to be more involved if they hold egalitarian gender-role attitudes. Overall, the study indicates that, while Christmas shopping may be a “labor of love” to some, it is most widely construed as “women's work.”

The ethnographic case study presented in this article illustrates the institutional complexity and sociocultural significance of a midwestern American flea market. A conception of market place structure and function that incorporates informal and festive dimensions of consumer behavior is advanced. The article explores the relationship of primary and secondary economic activity. Buyer and seller behavior, marketplace ambience, the social embeddedness of consumption, and experiential aspects of consumption are considered at length.

An important but relatively neglected area of consumer behavior—the pursuit of goals—is addressed. Two recent modifications of the Fishbein model are discussed, and an extension is introduced to better explain goal pursuit. Major revisions include (1) specification of three dimensions of attitude—toward success, failure, and the process of trying, (2) the incorporation of self-efficacy judgments as expectations of success and failure, and (3) refinement in the specificity of referents and their correspondence to reflect trying as the focal explanatory concept. Recency and frequency of past trying are independent variables in three models tested with weight loss data.

This article focuses on memory-based choice situations where changes in a brand's accessibility may affect the probability that it is retrieved and considered for choice. In such instances, factors other than evaluation may affect which brands are brought to mind at purchase. Two experiments are described that manipulate the determinants of brand accessibility and measure consequent effects on retrieval, consideration, choice, and evaluation. Results provide evidence for the influence of memory during the brand-choice process. For a brand to be selected in memory-based choice, the consumer must recall that brand and fail to recall other brands that might otherwise be preferred.

Results of a controlled experiment on the role of brand awareness in the consumer choice process showed that brand awareness was a dominant choice heuristic among awareness-group subjects. Subjects with no brand awareness tended to sample more brands and selected the high-quality brand on the final choice significantly more often than those with brand awareness. Thus, when quality differences exist among competing brands, consumers may “pay a price” for employing simple choice heuristics such as brand awareness in the interest of economizing time and effort. However, building brand awareness is a viable strategy for advertising aimed at increasing brand-choice probabilities.