When It Hurts to Have Good Image: Context Effects Without a Context
EXTENDED ABSTRACT - Imagine that I ask you how good McDonalds new Supreme Burger is. Assume further that Supreme Burger is expensive and thought to be of gourmet quality. You may use McDonalds usual products as a (negative) comparison standard and give Supreme Burger a higher rating than if the same burger were served at a gourmet restaurant, resulting in contrast. On the other hand, you may use the product type (i.e., foods served at gourmet restaurants) as a frame of reference, in which case you should get an assimilation effect and, as a result, may rate Supreme Burger lower than it should be. The bottom line is that consumer evaluations of a new product depend on whether they use a frame established by a company and contrast the new product to the existing product line, or whether they use the product type as a comparison standard. The main goal of the present study is to investigate under what circumstances a particular context effect could occur in new product evaluations.
Citation:
Hyeong Min Kim (2002) ,"When It Hurts to Have Good Image: Context Effects Without a Context", in NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 29, eds. Susan M. Broniarczyk and Kent Nakamoto, Valdosta, GA : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 216-217.
Imagine that I ask you how good McDonalds new Supreme Burger is. Assume further that Supreme Burger is expensive and thought to be of gourmet quality. You may use McDonalds usual products as a (negative) comparison standard and give Supreme Burger a higher rating than if the same burger were served at a gourmet restaurant, resulting in contrast. On the other hand, you may use the product type (i.e., foods served at gourmet restaurants) as a frame of reference, in which case you should get an assimilation effect and, as a result, may rate Supreme Burger lower than it should be. The bottom line is that consumer evaluations of a new product depend on whether they use a frame established by a company and contrast the new product to the existing product line, or whether they use the product type as a comparison standard. The main goal of the present study is to investigate under what circumstances a particular context effect could occur in new product evaluations. Although recent work in social cognition predicts the emergence of contrast as well as assimilation, most previous investigations on new product evaluations were conducted using the assimilation framework. A high fit between a new product and the core brand is assumed to facilitate the success of the product. The evaluation of a typical new product is thought to assimilate towards the core brand evaluation. The few studies on new product evaluations in marketing unexpectedly found contrast effects, however. For example, Brown and Dacin (1997) found that the relationship between new product evaluations and corporate associations reflected a contrast effect. In other words, a new product was evaluated more favorably when it was introduced by a company with poor image than when the same product was launched by a company with good image. This finding is surprising and rather unintuitive on surface. However, if consumers use the existing product line of a company as a comparison standard to judge a new product, a contrast effect can be observed, and this reasoning is in line with theorizing in the context effect literature. Most studies used ambiguous targets and explicitly provided a contextual cue in order to better detect context effects. However, such demonstratios are of limited interest to consumer research because in applied settings it is seldom possible to control cues and often times a new product is not totally ambiguous. Therefore, it would be interesting to see if context effects could be observed when (1) participants are not primed with a cue and (2) the target is relatively unambiguous. An experiment was conducted to demonstrate context effects in new product evaluations. Participants read a concrete description of a fictitious car marketed by either Hyundai (poor image) or BMW (good image). No priming task was introduced in the study. In one condition, the car was described as relatively decent, and in the other condition it was portrayed as superior. In the decent car condition, participants evaluated the car more favorably when it was introduced by Hyundai than when the same car was introduced by BMW, thus resulting in contrast. It seems that participants used the existing product line of the companies as a comparison standard. In the superior car condition, participants gave more favorable evaluations to the BMW car than to the same Hyundai car, reflecting assimilation, because they used the product type as a comparison standard. Although previous research argues that typicality of an exemplar determines the direction of a context effect, it was not the case in this study. A typical Hyundai car and an atypical BMW car resulted in contrast. The present research made important contributions to the literature on context effects and new product evaluations. First, it demonstrated that even a single piece of information embedded in the product description could serve as a powerful contextual cue to guide target evaluations. Context effects were observed when no cue was explicitly provided prior to target evaluations. Second, the study showed that even concrete exemplars could not escape from context effects. It seems that to avoid negative context effects marketers should include specific information in the description of a target to direct consumers attention to a certain comparison standard that is advantageous for the company. For example, when a company is introducing a downward brand extension, its marketing tactics should be devised in such a way that consumers will use the product type as a comparison standard. A follow-up study and other theoretical and practical implications are discussed. REFERENCES Aaker, David A. and Kevin L. Keller (1990), "Consumer Evaluations of Brand Extensions," Journal of Marketing, 54 (January), 27-41. Ahluwalia, Rohini and Zeynep Gnrhan-Canli (2000), "The Effects of Extensions on the Family Brand Name: An Accessibility-Diagnosticity Perspective," Journal of Consumer Research, 27 (December), 371-81. Bless, Herbert, Eric R. Igou, Nobert Schwarz, and Michaela WSnke (2000), "Reducing Context Effects by Adding Context Information: The Direction and Size of Context Effects in Political Judgement," Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 26 (September), 1036-1-45. Bless, Herbert and Michaela WSnke (2000), "Can the Same Information Be Typical and Atypical? How Perceived Typicality Moderates assimilation and Contrast in Evaluation Judgment," Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 26 (March), 306-14. Bless, Herbert, Nobert Schwarz, Galen V. Bodenhausen, and Lutz Thiel (forthcoming), "Personalized vesus Generalized Benefits of Stereotype Disconfirmation: Tradeoffs in the Evaluation of Atypical Exemplars and their Social Grous," Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Boush, David M. and Barbara Loken (1991), "A Process-Tracing Study of Brand Extension Evaluation," Journal of Marketing Research, 28 (February), 16-28. Brown, Tom J. and Peter A. Dacin (1997), "The Company and the Product: Corporate Associations and Consumer Product Responses," Journal of Marketing, 61 (January), 68-84. Herr, Paul M.(1989), "Priming Price: Prior Knowledge and Context Effects," Journal of Consumer Research, 16 (June), 67-75. Herr, Paul M., Steven J. Sherman, and Russel H. Fazio (1983), "On the Consequences of Priming: Assimilation and Contrast Effects," Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 19 (July), 323-40. Keller, Kevin L. (1993), "Conceptualizing, Measuring, and Managing Customer-Based Brand Equity," Journal of Marketing, 57 (January), 1-22. Kunda, Ziva and Kathryn C. Oleson (1999), "When Exceptions Prove the Rule: How Extremity of Deviance Determines the Impact of Deviant Examples of Stereotypes," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72 (5), 965-79. Meyers-Levy, Joan and Brian Sternthal (1993), "A Two-Factor Explanation of Assimilation and Contrast Effects," Journal of Marketing Research, 30 (August), 359-68. Park, C. Whan, Sandra Milberg, and Robert Lawson (1991), "Evaluation of Brand Extensions: The Role of Product Feature Similarity and Brand Concept Consistency," Journal of Consumer Research, 18 (September), 185-93. Romeo, Jean B. (1991), "The Effect of Negative Information on the Evaluations of Brand Extensions and the Family Brand," in Advances in Consumer Research, Vol. 18, eds. Rebecca H. Holman and Michael R. Solomon, Provo, UT: Association for Consumer Research, 399-406. Schwarz, Nobert and Herbert Bless (1992), "Assimilation and Contrast Effects in Attitude Measurement: An Inclusion/Exclusion Model," in Advances in Consumer Research, Vol. 19, eds. John F. Sherry and Brian Sternthal, Provo, UT: Association for Consumer Research, 72-77. Stapel, Diederik A., Willem Koomen, and Aart S. Velthuijsen (1998), "Assimilation or Contrast?: Comparison Relevance, Distinctness, and the Impact of Accessible Information on Consumer Judgments," Journal of Consumer Psychology, 7 (1), 1-24. Stapel, Diederik A. and Piotr Winkielman (2000), "Assimilation and Contrast as a Function of Context-Target Similarity, Distinctness, and Dimensional Relevance," Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 24 (June), 634-646. WSnke, Michaela, Herbert Bless, and Nobert Schwarz (1998), "Context Effects in Product Line Extensions: Context is Not Destiny," Journal of Consumer Psychology, 7 (4), 299-322. ----------------------------------------
Authors
Hyeong Min Kim, University of Michigan
Volume
NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 29 | 2002
Share Proceeding
Featured papers
See MoreFeatured
“It’s Not You, It’s Me”: How Corporate Social Responsibility Decreases Customer Citizenship Behavior
Sofia Batista Ferraz, EAESP-FGV
Andres Rodriguez Veloso, University of São Paulo, Brazil
Diogo Hildebrand, Baruch College, USA
Featured
How Employees Relate to Their Brand Online: A Critical Visual Analysis of Hollister
Stephanie Kogler, University of Innsbruck, Austria
Featured
People Overpredict the Benefit of Using Expensive Items and Appearing Rich in Friend-Making
Xilin Li, University of Chicago, USA
Christopher Hsee, University of Chicago, USA