Even before Goldman Sachs coined the term BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China), India has been important to the global business community, and not just for those interested in outsourcing back-office functions.
Previous studies of cultural consumption have found a significant but weak relationship between expert judgment (EJ) and popular appeal (PA) and have suggested that this little taste phenomenon reflects a mediating role played by ordinary evaluation (OE) in diluting the association between EJ and PA. However, various weaknesses in this work have involved problems with sequential timing, nonindependence of measurements, and contamination by market(ing)-related influences.
In recent years, product discussion forums have become a rich environment in which consumers and potential adopters exchange views and information. Researchers and practitioners are starting to extract user sentiment about products from user product reviews. Users often compare different products, stating which they like better and why.
This paper proposes that customers often respond to brand extension concepts by visualizing the product. We call this process spontaneous visualization and suggest that it precedes concept evaluations. In two studies, we show that spontaneous visualization is enhanced by the fit between the parent brand and the extension category and by the ease with which the product category can be imagined. The appeal of the visualized image in turn determines whether visualization enhances or decreases concept evaluations.
Following a successful idea generation exercise, a company might easily be left with hundreds of ideas, generated by experts, employees, or consumers. The next step is to screen these ideas, and identify those with the highest potential. In this paper we propose a practical approach to involving consumers in idea screening. Although the number of ideas may potentially be very large, it would be unreasonable to ask each consumer to evaluate more than a few ideas. This raises the challenge of efficiently selecting the ideas to be evaluated by each consumer.
Several individual, social-setting, and choice-set factors have been shown to be related to satisfaction. This article argues that these factors operate through a set of choice goals. Using panel data on purchasers of consumer electronics, the authors examine how five goals (justifiability, confidence, anticipated regret, evaluation costs, and final negative affect) drive decision and consumption satisfaction, which in turn determine loyalty, product recommendations, and the amount and valence of word of mouth.
Our goal in this chapter is to review for social psychologists some of the interesting research done in consumer behavior and marketing.
Three experiments investigate the emotions that arise from buying or not buying at an unintended purchase opportunity and how they color evaluations of affective advertising appeals that are viewed subsequently. We demonstrate that buying can cause happiness tempered with guilt, while not buying causes pride. Consistent with the felt affect, respondents who had bought at time 1 subsequently prefer happiness appeals to pride appeals, while those who had refrained prefer pride appeals.
This research addresses refutation of false beliefs formed on the basis of repeated exposure to advertisements. Experiment 1 explores belief in the refutation as a function of the perceptual details shared (alignment) between the claim and the refutation as manipulated by whether the original claim was direct (assertion) or indirect (implication). Experiment 2 then examines whether this effect will carry through to belief in the original claim after exposure to the refutation. Findings indicate that direct refutations of indirect claims are believed more than refutations of direct claims.