Postexperience Advertising Effects on Consumer Memory

Past research suggests that marketing communications create expectations that influence the way consumers subsequently learn from their product experiences. Since postexperience information can also be important and is widespread for established goods and services, it is appropriate to ask about the cognitive effects of these efforts. The postexperience advertising situation is conceptualized here as an instant source-forgetting problem where the language and imagery from the recently presented advertising become confused with consumers’ own experiential memories. It is suggested that, through a reconstructive memory process, this advertising information affects how and what consumers remember. Consumers may come to believe that their past product experience had been as suggested by the advertising. Over time this postexperience advertising information can become incorporated into the brand schema and influence future product decisions

Memory Change: An Intimate Measure of Persuasion

A major goal for advertising is to have an enduring emotional impact on an audience by facilitating their creation of personally relevant understandings of an advertisement. This is achieved through a process of cocreation in which consumers integrate advertising content with their own attitudes, beliefs, and values to produce the meaning of an advertisement. This article proposes an approach to evaluating advertisements that builds on the reconstructive nature of memory, the dominant view of memory today. The reconstructive view of memory holds that the memory for the same event is different each time it is recalled and that the person doing the recalling is unaware of these changes. We present an experimental paradigm that assesses advertising\u27s influence on consumers\u27 own memory of their beliefs. We demonstrate that advertising can unconsciously alter consumers\u27 beliefs as reflected by a change in how consumers recall their earlier reporting of these beliefs following an advertising exposure. That is, advertising that causes consumers to remember differently earlier (preadvertising exposure) reported beliefs and in which the change is in the direction of the advertisement\u27s message is an advertisement that contains information the consumer has unconsciously adopted as their own and therefore is likely to be personally relevant and to have an enduring impact on their emotions

Transforming Consumer Experience: When Timing Matters

How advertising can influence or change consumers\u27 product experience has been a topic of great interest to marketers. The majority of research has suggested that advertising received prior to an experience can exert the most influence. In 1999, however, Braun introduced the concept of reconstructive memory, and demonstrated that advertising received after an experience can alter how consumers remember their experience. The issue of which order of framing of an experience through advertising is most influential on consumer memory has not yet been investigated. A constructive memory framework that can take into account both forward- and backward-framing effects and an experiment that tests hypotheses regarding the presentation order of advertising and experience is presented. The implications for the study of transformational advertising are discussed

Assessing the Long-Term Impact of a Consistent Advertising Campaign on Consumer Memory

How effective is an advertising campaign that has consistently used the same theme since consumers\u27 early childhood? To answer that question one has to consider the effect the campaign has had on consumers\u27 memory. This research begins by discussing the structure of memory and schematic processes that occur when similar or related information is presented over time. Evidence is reviewed which suggests that early exposure would be critical in the brand schema\u27s development. An experiment that tests the strength of the brand schema in a competitive environment and a survey that explores the importance of time of initial exposure to present-day affect and attitudes toward the brand are presented. The implications of the results for advertising research and practice are then discussed

Advertising\u27s Misinformation Effect

This research explores whether post-experience advertising alters information learned in a consumer\u27s direct experience. An advertising misinformation effect was obtained for colour memory of a previously seen candy bar wrapper upon both visual and verbal misinformation. However, the misleading visual information produced more ‘remember’ judgements than misleading verbal information. This advertising misinformation effect did not dissipate when the source was discredited. We found that such memory changes can be directly linked to consumer subjective judgements and choices when the misleading information is particularly salient. Not only do these findings constitute a novel generalizability of the misinformation effect, they also have implications for social policy research on deceptive advertising

Digging Deeper: Art Museums in Las Vegas?

[Excerpt] Las Vegas has been called the “city of reinvention” (Douglass and Raento 2003). Part of its more recent reinvention efforts has included the opening of five fine-art venues. However, one of the art museums––the Las Vegas Guggenheim––was shut down in its first year due to low attendance; another, the Bellagio Fine Art Gallery, has seen attendance dwindle (Schemeligian 2004). The question addressed here is whether the museums are bringing the intended intangible benefits to the host resort, or whether the sales and attendance figures represent overall disinterest. More broadly one considers the potential “fit” between sin-city and the high-art cultural world. The difficulty in addressing these issues is that tourists might not consciously recognize the value they feel about having a worldclass art museum onsite. Within nonprofit research there has been a call for ‘‘deeper understanding’’ of tourists (Thyne 2001) as reflected within the greater interest in new qualitative methodologies (Riley and Love 2000). The Zaltman metaphor elicitation technique, a patented research method, was chosen to investigate this research issue. Many of the world’s largest companies (such as Procter & Gamble) have utilized this method for insight on brand meaning and competitive positioning

Using Childhood Memory to Gain Insight into Brand Meaning

In this article, the authors introduce the concept that people\u27s earliest and defining product memories can be used as a projective tool to help managers more fully understand consumers\u27 relationships to their products. The authors use a study on three generations of automobile consumers to illustrate how these memories symbolize the consumer-brand relationship and how they can be used to gain insights into brand meaning. The findings indicate that people\u27s earliest and defining experiences have an important influence on current and future preferences in predictable ways across the consumer life cycle. These memory experiences are symbolic to the consumer and represent a new lens for viewing brand meaning, which complements the toolbox of extant research methods. The authors provide details about this technique for managers who are searching for methods that recognize that consumers coproduce brand meanings

Tourist Memory Distortion

Tourists\u27 memories of prior vacation experiences are an important source of information as they, their family, and their friends make future travel plans. However, those memories may be distorted by other types of information to which the tourists are exposed after they visit, such as advertising and other tourists\u27 memory stories. In the present article, we utilize the false memory paradigm from cognitive psychology to assess whether external information sources can distort how tourists remember their own past. We end with a discussion of the implications of our results for tourism research and propose some future areas for investigation

The Impact of Program Context on Motivational System Activation and Subsequent Effects on Processing a Fear Appeal

This manuscript reports three experiments investigating the impact of television programming context on the processing of a fear-appeal message. This is done using a dual-motivation system theory conceptualizing emotion as arising from activation of the appetitive and/or aversive motivational systems. Results show that, as predicted, sad programming activates viewers\u27 aversive motivational systems, whereas comedic programming activates their appetitive motivational systems. Furthermore, by activating these systems through programming context, we were able to predict both retrospective self-report and real-time physiological reactions to a persuasive message employing a fear-appeal strategy. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed, as are suggestions for future experiments using the dual-motivation approach

Mentoring, Training, and Scholarly Productivity Experiences of Cancer-Related Health Disparities Research Trainees: Do Outcomes Differ for Underrepresented Scientists?

The study aims to explore variation in scholarly productivity outcomes by underrepresented status among a diverse sample of researchers in a community-engaged training program. We identified 141 trainees from a web-based survey of researchers in the National Cancer Institute-funded, Community Networks Program Centers (CNPCs) (2011-2016). We conducted a series of multiple logistic regression models to estimate the effect of National Institutes of Health (NIH)-defined underrepresented status on four, self-reported, scholarly productivity outcomes in the previous 5 years: number of publications (first-authored and total) and funded grants (NIH and any agency). Sixty-five percent (n = 92) indicated NIH underrepresented status. In final adjusted models, non-NIH underrepresented (vs. underrepresented) trainees reported an increased odds of having more than the median number of total publications (> 9) (OR = 3.14, 95% CI 1.21-8.65) and any grant funding (OR = 5.10, 95% CI 1.77-14.65). Reporting ≥ 1 mentors (vs. none) was also positively associated (p < 0.05) with these outcomes. The CNPC underrepresented trainees had similar success in first-authored publications and NIH funding as non-underrepresented trainees, but not total publications and grants. Examining trainees' mentoring experiences over time in relation to scholarly productivity outcomes is needed