Knowledge that Transforms

An affect-confirmation process is proposed to explain the conditions in which information that is similar in valence (i.e., evaluatively consistent) with a person’s mood is weighted more heavily in product judgments. Specifically, the affect that participants experience as a result of a transitory mood state may appear to either confirm or disconfirm their reactions to product information, leading them to give this information more or less weight when evaluating the product as a whole. This affective confirmation typically occurs when hedonic criteria are considered more important in evaluation than utilitarian criteria. Four experiments confirmed implications of this conceptualization. The affect that people experience at the time they receive information about an object can influence the manner in which they process this information and, therefore, the judgments that follow. This influence has been detected in both consumer judgment and elsewhere (for reviews, see Clore, Schwarz, and Conway [1994]; Cohen and Areni

Two experiments examine the existence of, and explanation for, emotional contagion effects on product attitudes. In the first experiment, emotional contagion occurred among "receivers" who "caught" a happy emotion from "senders" whom the receivers liked. The relationship between the emotion experienced by senders and receivers was found to be mediated by receivers mimicking smiling on the part of senders. Exposing receivers to happy senders they liked also resulted in receivers having a positive attitudinal bias toward a product. The happiness experienced by receivers via contagion was found to mediate the effects of sender emotion and receiver liking of the sender on receiver product attitudes. The second experiment replicated the first while demonstrating that observation of the facial expressions of senders by receivers, thus allowing mimicking of smiling, was a necessary condition for emotional contagion to occur. The relevance of emotional contagion for understanding consumer behavior across various substantive domains is discussed.

To understand really new products, consumers face the challenge of constructing new knowledge structures rather simply changing existing ones. Recent research in categorization suggests that one strategy for creating representations for these new products is to use information already contained in familiar product categories. While knowledge from multiple existing categories may be relevant, little research has examined how (and if) consumers process information drawn from more than one domain. We use two experiments to demonstrate how consumers use cues from multiple categories to develop expectations about and preferences for new products. Our findings suggest that the first plausible category label provided to the consumer significantly influences their categorizations, expectations, and preferences. Only when advertisers place limits on the type of information to transfer from each existing category can consumers use information from multiple categories effectively.

This article draws on social dilemma theory and reference group theory to understand the individual boycott decision and tests the predictions stemming from this conceptualization in two experiments. Consistent with our predictions, consumers' likelihood of participating in both economic and social-issue boycotts is jointly determined by their perceptions of the boycott's likelihood of success, their susceptibility to normative social influences, and the costs they incur in boycotting. Consumers' success perceptions are, in turn, determined by their expectations of overall participation and efficacy, as well as the message frame inherent in proboycott communications. Two key determinants of consumers' boycotting costs are their preference for the boycotted product and their access to its substitutes. More specifically, consumers who are more susceptible to the normative influence exerted by the reference group of potential boycotters are more influenced by expected overall participation rates in their boycott likelihood.

The development and validation of measures to assess multiple dimensions of consumer self-confidence are described in this article. Scale-development procedures resulted in a six-factor correlated model made up of the following dimensions: information acquisition, consideration-set formation, personal outcomes, social outcomes, persuasion knowledge, and marketplace interfaces. A series of studies demonstrate the psychometric properties of the measures, their discriminant validity with respect to related constructs, their construct validity, and their ability to moderate relationships among other important consumer behavior variables.

In this article, I examine the cultural and subcultural construction of consumption meanings and practices as they are negotiated from mass media images and objects. Field notes and artifacts from 20 months of fieldwork at Star Trek fan clubs, at conventions, and in Internet groups, and 67 interviews with Star Trek fans are used as data. Star Trek's subculture of consumption is found to be constructed as a powerful utopian refuge. Stigma, social situation, and the need for legitimacy shape the diverse subcultures' consumption meanings and practices. Legitimizing articulations of Star Trek as a religion or myth underscore fans' heavy investment of self in the text. These sacralizing articulations are used to distance the text from its superficial status as a commercial product. The findings emphasize and describe how consumption often fulfills the contemporary hunger for a conceptual space in which to construct a sense of self and what matters in life. They also reveal broader cultural tensions between the affective investments people make in consumption objects and the encroachment of commercialization.

Many technological innovations introduce attributes that are novel or completely unknown to a large number of consumers. For example, recently introduced attributes such as GPS in cars or I-Link in computers are likely to have been novel to many consumers. Past research suggests that the addition of novel attributes is likely to improve product evaluation and sales, since consumers interpret these attributes as additional benefits provided by the manufacturer. However, this article demonstrates that the positive effect of novel attributes holds only in the case of low-complexity products. In the case of high-complexity products, the addition of novel attributes can actually reduce product evaluation because of negative learning-cost inferences about these attributes. Further, the positive and negative effects of novel attributes on product evaluation are accentuated by external search for information when the information discovered through search is ambiguous in nature. Finally, it is shown that the negative effect of novel attributes on the evaluation of high-complexity products can persist even after consumers are given explicit information about the benefits of novel attributes. A key marketing implication of these findings is that novel attributes may contribute to technophobia, or consumer resistance toward technological innovation.

A second-order meta-analysis was conducted to assess the implications of using college student subjects in social science research. Four meta-analyses investigating response homogeneity (cumulative N 1 650,000) and 30 meta-analyses reporting effect sizes for 65 behavioral or psychological relationships (cumulative N 1 350,000) provided comparative data for college student subjects and nonstudent (adult) subjects for the present research. In general, responses of college student subjects were found to be slightly more homogeneous than those of nonstudent subjects. Moreover, effect sizes derived from college student subjects frequently differed from those derived from nonstudent subjects both directionally and in magnitude. Because there was no systematic pattern to the differences observed, caution must be exercised when attempting to extend any relationship found using college student subjects to a nonstudent (adult) population. The results augur in favor of, and emphasize the importance of, replicating research based on college student subjects with nonstudent subjects before attempting any generalizations. Asubtle indicator of the importance of an issue in the

The literature indicating that person-, context-, and task-specific factors cause consumers to utilize different decision strategies has generally failed to affect the specification of choice models used by practitioners and academics alike, who still tend to assume an utility maximizing, omniscient, indefatigable consumer. This article (1) introduces decision strategy selection, within a maintained compensatory framework, into aggregate choice models via latent classes, which arise because of task complexity; (2) it demonstrates that within an experimental choice task, the model reflects changing aggregate preferences as choice complexity changes and as the task progresses. The import of these findings for current practice, model interpretation, and future research needs is examined.

This article introduces the idea of brand community. A brand community is a specialized, non-geographically bound community, based on a structured set of social relations among admirers of a brand. Grounded in both classic and contemporary sociology and consumer behavior, this article uses ethnographic and computer mediated environment data to explore the characteristics, processes, and particularities of three brand communities (those centered on Ford Bronco, Macintosh, and Saab). These brand communities exhibit three traditional markers of community: shared consciousness, rituals and traditions, and a sense of moral responsibility. The commercial and mass-mediated ethos in which these communities are situated affects their character and structure and gives rise to their particularities. Implications for branding, sociological theories of community, and consumer behavior are offered.