Can Evaluative Conditioning Change Well-Established Attitudes Towards Popular Brands? Your Brain Says Yes Even Though Your Mouth Says No

Abstract

In the present study, using both implicit and explicit measures, we addressed the issue of whether strongly developed relationships towards brands could be modified through the use of evaluative conditioning. Using an online survey, individual participant brand lists were created, and formed the basis of this experiment. Participants were then exposed to conditioning during a longitudinal study. Throughout the experiment, a combination of explicit and implicit measures was used to assess changes in attitude. Specifically, participants were asked to rate the brand names on a Likert-type scale. Simultaneously, changes in the brains electrical activity in response to the brands were recorded via electroencephalography (EEG). Upon completion of this task, participants underwent two Implicit Association Tests (IAT; one for liked brands and one for disliked brands). There were two main findings of this study. Firstly, no significant changes in attitude were observed via the use of explicit measures, and those that were found relating to the IAT were regarded as questionable. Secondly, EEG presented consistent results which showed that conditioning elicited changes in cortical activity towards both liked and disliked brands, which suggest it may be a useful tool in measuring the impact of evaluative conditioning that is not reflected in verbal responses.

The role of associative learning in healthy and sustainable food evaluations: An event-related potential study

“…Our results suggest that the EC-based intervention effectively strengthened the semantic association between MP-food and the healthiness concept, supporting the notion that the early component of the N400 is a suitable index showing the change of associations between food and food-related information (Ma et al, 2014;Blechert et al, 2016;Hoogeveen et al, 2016;Pergola et al, 2017). Indeed, ERPs have been recognized as a useful measure to assess the impact of evaluative conditioning that is not reflected in responses which were measured by explicit ratings and the IAT (Bosshard et al, 2019).…”

“…Importantly, the evidence of EC effects is mainly based on behavioral tasks, with no reference to the neural underpinnings of such effects in the domain of food evaluation and food choice. Neural imaging techniques, especially electroencephalography (EEG) has been recognized as a useful tool in measuring the impact of evaluative conditioning on the change of attitude towards brand names that are not reflected in verbal responses measured by explicit and implicit behavioral paradigms (Bosshard, Koller, & Walla, 2019). Thus, the present study aims to fill these gaps by examining the neural processing underlying the effect of EC in changing food-related semantic associations.…”

Picking Your Brains: Where and How Neuroscience Tools Can Enhance Marketing Research

“…Consumer neuroscience tools can be used to investigate the emotional component underling brand evaluation and choice, for example, differences between two similar brands (e.g., Pepsi vs. Coke) (Ma et al, 2007 , 2008 ; Lucchiari and Pravettoni, 2012 ; Reimann et al, 2012a , b ; Pop et al, 2013 ; Al-Kwifi, 2016 ; Guo et al, 2018 ). Bosshard et al ( 2016 ) used EEG to test whether or not liked and disliked brands are further associated with different motivational aspects. The findings of this study suggest that liked brands elicited significantly more positive going waveforms (late positive potentials) than disliked brands over right parietal cortical areas.…”

Uncovering the potential of evaluative conditioning in shaping attitudes toward sustainable product packaging

“…Thus, to further investigate the cognitive and emotional components underlying evaluative conditioning for pro-environmental behavior change, we propose for future research to apply neurophysiological measurements to the proposed framework. For example, Bosshard et al (2019) conditioned (dis-)liked brand names with (un-)pleasant sounds and observed that while there were no changes in explicit liking of the brands, variations were observed in neural measures: EEG frontal asymmetry increased for disliked brands when coupled to pleasant sounds and similarly decreased for liked brands that were coupled to unpleasant sounds. Moreover, differences in event-related potentials were observed after extensive sessions of evaluative conditioning ( Kuchinke et al, 2015 ).…”