What Do Novice Consumers Remember?

ABSTRACT - A recall advantage has been found for consumers with expert domain knowledge when searching, comprehending (i.e. Brucks 1985; Huffman and Houston 1993; Roehm and Sternthal 2001; Spence and Brucks 1997 Sujan 1985), and remembering (i.e. Cowley and Mitchell 2003; Maheswaran 1994) product information. The to-be-learned information is generally a written description of functional attributes (information about how a brand performs) for hypothetical brands or products (i.e. Cowley and Mitchell 2003; Huffman and Houston 1993; Johnson and Russo 1984; Srull 1983). In these studies, memory performance was calculated by accurate recall of the attributes: higher knowledge consumers (HKCs) consistently outperformed lower knowledge consumers (LKCs). Since HKCs are generally categorized as experts by their knowledge of functional attributes, it is not surprising that they would more effectively learn and remember this information. Less attention has been paid to what novices learn when they are exposed to brand or product information.

Citation:

Elizabeth Cowley and >Andrew A. Mitchell (2005) ,"What Do Novice Consumers Remember?", in NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 32, eds. Geeta Menon and Akshay R. Rao, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 437-438.