How and When Advertising Can Influence Memory for Consumer Experience
HOW AND WHEN ADVERTISING CAN INFLUENCE MEMORY FOR CONSUMER EXPERIENCE
Journal of Advertising, Winter 2004 by Braun-LaTour, Kathryn A, LaTour, Michael S, Pickrell, Jacqueline E, Loftus, Elizabeth F
ABSTRACT: Recent "paradigm shifting" research in consumer behavior dealing with reconstructive memory processes suggests that advertising can exert a powerful retroactive effect on how consumers remember their past experiences with a product. Building on this stream of research, we have executed three studies that incorporate the use of false cues with the aim of shedding new light on how post-experience advertising exerts influence on recollection. Our first experiment investigates an important but yet unexplored issue to advertisers who are perhaps reticent about embracing this paradigm: Does the false cue fundamentally change how consumers process information? After finding that when the false information goes undetected it is processed in a similar manner as more "truthful" cues, we use this paradigm to shed light on the pictorial versus verbal information debate in advertising. We discuss the implications of our findings for those interested in managing consumer experience and for advertising researchers seeking indirect measures of the influence of advertising.
Remember your childhood visit to Disneyland-Cinderella 's castle glistening, the cartoon characters laughing, grouping for photos, the many rides with their height requirements, the smells of freshly cooked food, and Bugs Bunny shaking your hand? As you bring that experience to mind, you may have the feeling you are reliving it, seeing your childhood pass through your mind 's eye, much like reviewing a videotape. But the way human memory works is very different from that of a video tape recorder-our memories are actually reconstructions of bits and pieces of information we have obtained over time. Sometimes those reconstructions are very similar to what we experienced; other times we are "tricked"
Journal of Advertising, Winter 2004 by Braun-LaTour, Kathryn A, LaTour, Michael S, Pickrell, Jacqueline E, Loftus, Elizabeth F
ABSTRACT: Recent "paradigm shifting" research in consumer behavior dealing with reconstructive memory processes suggests that advertising can exert a powerful retroactive effect on how consumers remember their past experiences with a product. Building on this stream of research, we have executed three studies that incorporate the use of false cues with the aim of shedding new light on how post-experience advertising exerts influence on recollection. Our first experiment investigates an important but yet unexplored issue to advertisers who are perhaps reticent about embracing this paradigm: Does the false cue fundamentally change how consumers process information? After finding that when the false information goes undetected it is processed in a similar manner as more "truthful" cues, we use this paradigm to shed light on the pictorial versus verbal information debate in advertising. We discuss the implications of our findings for those interested in managing consumer experience and for advertising researchers seeking indirect measures of the influence of advertising.
Remember your childhood visit to Disneyland-Cinderella 's castle glistening, the cartoon characters laughing, grouping for photos, the many rides with their height requirements, the smells of freshly cooked food, and Bugs Bunny shaking your hand? As you bring that experience to mind, you may have the feeling you are reliving it, seeing your childhood pass through your mind 's eye, much like reviewing a videotape. But the way human memory works is very different from that of a video tape recorder-our memories are actually reconstructions of bits and pieces of information we have obtained over time. Sometimes those reconstructions are very similar to what we experienced; other times we are "tricked"
References: Aaker, David A., and Douglas M. Stayman (1992), "Implementing the Concept of Transformational Advertising," Psychology and Marketing, 9 (May/June), 237-253. Appel, Valentine, and Milton L. Blum (1961), "Ad Recognition and Respondent Set," Journal of Advertising Research, 1 (June), 13-21. Battlett, Frederic C. (1932), Remembering, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baumgartner, Hans, Mita Sujan, and James R. Bettman (1992), "Autobiographical Memories, Affect and Consumer Information Processi ng" Journal of Consumer Psychology, 1 (1), 53-82. Boulding, William, Ajay Kalra, Richard Staelin, and Valarie Zeithaml (1993), "A Dynamic Process Model of Service Quality: From Expectations to Behavioral Intentions,"Journal of Marketing Research, 30 (February), 7-27. Braun, Kathryn A. (1999), "Post-experience Advertising Effects on Consumer Memory," Journal of Consumer Research, 2 (March), 319-334. _____, and Elizabeth F. Loftus (1998), "Advertising 's Misinformation Effect," Applied Cognitive Psychology, 12 (December), 569-591. _____, Rhiannon Ellis, and Elizabeth F. Loftus (2002), "Make My Memory: How Advertising Can Change Our Memories of the Past," Psychology and Marketing, 19 (January), 1-23 Childers, Terry L., and Michael J Clark, E. (1985), The Want Makers: Inside the World of Advertising, New York: Penguin Books. Cornelissen, Joep P., and Andrew R. Lock (2002), "Advertising Research and Its Influence on Managerial Practice," Journal of Advertising Research, 42 (3), 50-55. Deighton, John (1984), "The Interaction of Advertising and Evidence," Journal of Consumer Research, 11 (December), 763770. _____, and Robert M. Schindler (1988), "Can Advertising Influence Experience?" Psychology ana1 Marketing, 5 (Summer), 103-115. _____, Daniel Romer, and Josh McQueen (1989), "Using Drama to Persuade," Journal of Consumer Research, 16 (December), 335-344. Dodson, Chad S., and Daniel L. Schacter (2001), '"If I Had Said It I Would Have Remembered It ': Reducing False Memories with a Distinctiveness Heuristic," Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 8 (March), 155-161. Edell, Julie A., and Richard Staelin (1983), "The Information Processing of Pictures in Print Advertisements, "Journal of Consumer Research, 10 (June), 45-61. Ehrenberg, Andrew, Neil Barnard, Rachel Kennedy, and Helen Bloom (2002), "Brand Advertising as Creative Publicity," Journal of Advertising Research, 42 (4), 7-19. Franzen, Giep, and Margot Bouwman (2001), The Mental World of Brands, WARC, U.K.: World Advertising Research Centre. Gardner, Meryl P., and Michael J. Houston (1986), "The Effects of Verbal and Visual Components of Retail Communications," Journal of Retailing, 62 (Spring), 64-78. Garry, Maryanne, Charles G. Manning, Elizabeth F. Loftus, and Stephen J. Sherman (1996), "Imagination Inflation: Imagining a Childhood Event Inflates Confidence That It Occurred," Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 3 (2), 208-214. Greenwald, Anthony G., Debbie E. McGhee, and Jordan L. K. Schwartz (1998), "Measuring Individual Differences in Implicit Cognition: The Implicit Association Test," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 1464-1480. Hall, Bruce F. (2002), "A New Model for Measuring Advertising Effectiveness," Journal of Advertising Research, 42 (2), 23-32. _____, and John Deighton (1989), "Managing What Consumers Learn from Experience, " Journal of Marketing, 53 (April), 1-20. Hunter, Ian Melville Logan (1964), Memory, London: Penguin Books. Johar, Gita Venkataramani (1995), "Consumer Involvement and Deception from Implied Advertising Claims, " Journal of Marketing Research, 32 (August), 267-279. Johnson, Marcia K., Mary A. Foley, Aurora F. Suengas, and Carol L. Raye (1988), "Phenomenal Characteristics of Memories for Perceived and Imagined Autobiographical Events," Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 117 (December), 371-376. Keller, Kevin L. (1987), "Memory Factors in Advertising: The Effect of Advertising Retrieval Cues on Brand Evaluations," Journal of Consumer Research, 14 (December), 316-333. _____ (1991), "Cue Compatibility and Framing in Advertising, "Journal of Marketing Research, 28 (February), 42-57. Lampinen, James M., and Vicki L. Smith (1995), "The Incredible (and Sometimes Incredulous), Child Witness: Child Witnesses ' Sensitivity to Source Credibility Cues," Journal of Applied Psychology, 80 (October), 621-627. Loftus, Elizabeth F. (1977), "Shifting Human Color Memory," Memory and Cognition, 5, 696. _____ (1979), "Reactions to Blatantly Contradictory Information," Memory and Cognition, 1, 368-374. _____ (1982), "Memory and Its Distortions," G. Stanley Hall Lecture Series, Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. _____, and Jacqueline E. Pickrell (1995), "The Formulation of False Memories," Psychiatric Annals, 25, 720-725. Lucas, Darreil B., and M. J. Murphy (1939), "False Identification of Advertisements in Recognition Tests," Journal of Applied Psychology, 23, 264-269. Mayer, Martin (1991), Whatever Happened to Madison Avenue? Advertising in the 90s, Boston: Little, Brown. Meyers-Levy, Joan, and Prashant Malaviya (1999), "Consumers ' Processing of Persuasive Advertisements: An Integrative Framework of Persuasion Theories," Journal of Marketing, 63, 45-60. Neisser, Ulric (1982), Memory Observed, San Francisco: W.H. Freedman. Olson, Jerry C., and Phillip A. Dover (1979), "Disconfirmation of Consumer Expectations Through Product Trial," Journal of Applied Psychology, 64 (April), 179-189. Paivio, Allan (1971), Imagery and Verbal Processes, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Pezdek, Kathy (1977), "Cross-modality Semantic Integration of Sentence and Picture Memory," Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 3, 515-524. _____, Kimberly Finger, and Danelle Hodge (1997), "Planting False Childhood Memories: The Role of Plausibility," Psychological Science, 8 (November), 437-441. Phillips, Barbara J. (2000), "The Impact of Verbal Anchoring on Consumer Response to Image Ads," Journal of Advertising, 29(1), 15-24. Reber, Arthur S. (1985), Dictionary of Psychology, London: Penguin Books. Rossiter, John R., and Larry Percy (1980), "Attitude Change Through Visual Imagery in Advertising, "Journal of Advertising, 9(2), 10-16. Schacter, Daniel (1996), Searching for Memory, New York: BasicBooks. _____, Wilma Koutstaal, Martha Johnson, and M. S. Gross (1997), "False Recollection Induced by Photographs: A Comparison of Older and Younger Adults," Psychology and Aging, 12(2), 203-215. Schmitt, Bernd H. (1994), "Contextual Priming of Visual Information in Advertisements, " Psychology and Marketing, 11 (1), 1-14. Smith, Ruth Ann (1991), "The Effects of Visual and Verbal Advertising Information on Consumers ' Inferences," Journal of Advertising, 20(4), 13-25. Stafford, Maria Royne (1996), "Tangibility in Services Advertising: An Investigation of Verbal Versus Visual Cues," Journal of Advertising, 25 (3), 13-29. Sutherland, Max, and Larry Friedman (2000), "Do You Model Ad Awareness or Advertising Awareness?" Journal of Advertising 'Research, 40 (5), 32-37. Tousignant, James P., David Hall, and Elizabeth F. Loftus (1986), "Discrepancy Detection and Vulnerability to Misleading Postevent Information," Memory and Cognition, 14, 329-338. Wade, Kimberley A., Maryanne Garry, Don J. Read, and Stephan Lindsay (2002), "A Picture Is Worth a Thousand lies: Using False Photographs to Create False Childhood Memories," Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 9 (September), 597-603. Weldon, Mary S., and Henry L. Roediger (1987), "Altering Retrieval Demands Reverses the Picture Superiority Effect," Memory and Cognition, 15 (July), 269-280. Wells, William D. (1986), "Three Useful Ideas," in Advances in Consumer Research, vol. 13, Richard J. Lutz, ed., Provo, UT: Association for Consumer Research, 9-12. Yamashita, Masako (1996), "A Re-examination of the Misinformation Effect by Means of Visual and Verbal Recognition Tests," Japanese Psychological Research, 38, 47-52. Yi, Youjae (1990), "Direct and Indirect Approaches to Advertising Persuasion: Which Is More Effective?" Journal of Business Research, 20 (4), 279-292. Zaltman, Gerald (1997), "Rethinking Market Research: Putting People Back In," Journal of Marketing Research, 34 (4), 424-437. Zaragoza, Maria S., and Karen J. Mitchell (1996), "Repeated Exposure to Suggestion and the Creation of False Memories," Psychological Science, 7 (September), 294-300.