Marketing

This study shows how experiential product attributes that are part of the design of new products can create compelling consumer experiences. Following processing-fluency theory, when consumers attend to experiential attributes (sensory or affective), they should process them fluently (i.e., spontaneously and with little effort); however, consumers should process functional attributes always deliberately, irrespective of whether or not they attend to them.

This research examines how consumers choose retailers when they are uncertain about store prices prior to shopping. Simulating everyday choice, participants made successive retailer choices where on each occasion they chose a retailer and only then learned product prices. The results of a series of studies demonstrated that participants were more likely to choose a retailer that offered an everyday low pricing strategy (EDLP) or that offered frequent small discounts over a retailer that offered infrequent large discounts.

This cross-cultural study examined television advertising appeals (functional versus experiential and local versus global appeals) and their relationship with brand knowledge core components (brand awareness, brand attitude, and brand uniqueness) across countries at different levels of economic development. A dataset of 257 television commercials from 23 countries was used in the analysis. The researchers found that the experiential (emotional) appeal had a stronger relationship with the components of brand knowledge in countries with medium and high gross domestic product (GDP).

It has been observed that ad-evoked feelings exert a positive influence on brand attitudes. To investigate the empirical generalizability of this phenomenon, we analyzed the responses of 1,576 consumers to 1,070 TV commercials from more than 150 different product categories. The findings suggest five empirical generalizations. First, ad-evoked feelings indeed have a substantial impact on brand evaluations, even under conditions that better approximate real marketplace settings than past studies did.

Consumer psychology faces serious issues of internal and external relevance. Most of these issues originate in seven fundamental problems with the way consumer psychologists plan and conduct their research that could be called the seven sins of consumer psychology.

Markets for information products exhibit varying degrees of competition on both the supply and the demand side. This paper studies the potential complementarity of information products, equilibrium information buying behaviors and information price setting in such markets. Our game-theoretic model consists of two information providers selling imperfect information to two competing clients and allows for different information quality levels as well as varying degrees of client competition.

We posit that compared to the cognitive system, the affective system of judgment and decision making is relatively more engaged in the present. Specifically, we hypothesize that even if their accessibility is held constant, affective feelings are weighted more heavily in consumer judgments and decisions set in the present than in equivalent judgments and decisions set in the future or in the past.

As firms increasingly seek out consumers' ideas in various domains, they will encounter individuals with different levels of domain-specific knowledge. While both low- and high-knowledge consumers may be willing to share their ideas benevolently, the performance of the former is likely to be hindered by their lack of relevant knowledge in the problem domain. It is also well established that, despite their abundant knowledge, high-knowledge consumers may not perform in accordance with their full potential (due to factors such as shallow processing and inattention).

The Attachment-Aversion (AA) Relationship model offers a unifying model of customer-brand relationships. To develop it further as a relevant consumer-psychology model, future research should examine three key factors: how brand perception differs from person perceptions; what role brand experiences play as determinants of customer-brand relationships, and how the AA Relationship model fits with other brand frameworks. The author offers insights and suggestions on how to address these three tasks.