Implications of the Relationship Between Retrieval Strength and Storage Strength in a Comparative Advertising Context

Marketers of little known brands often advertise their brands in comparison to the market leader. In order to avoid giving “free” advertising to the market leader some ads omit the name of the leader. While this practice may improve the brand image or positioning of the weak brand, our data show that such indirect comparison can hurt recall of the weak brand. Our results suggest that indirect comparisons in advertisements induce retrieval of the leading brand, thus taking cognitive resources away from the encoding of the weak brand, ultimately hurting later recall of that brand. We discuss our findings with respect to the New Theory of Disuse (Bjork and Bjork 1992; see also Estes 1955).

Citation:

Sara Appleton-Knapp and Antonia Mantonakis (2009) ,"Implications of the Relationship Between Retrieval Strength and Storage Strength in a Comparative Advertising Context", in AP - Asia-Pacific Advances in Consumer Research Volume 8, eds. Sridhar Samu, Rajiv Vaidyanathan, and Dipankar Chakravarti, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 179-184.