Context Effects in Diverse-Category Brand Environments: The Influence of Target Product Positioning and Consumers' Processing Mind-Set

Abstract

We investigate the apparent rarity of contrast effects in diverse-category contextual and target product settings. Three studies show that the direction of context effects depends on (a) whether target product positioning is abstract or concrete, (b) consumers' adoption of an item-specific, similarity-focused relational or dissimilarity-focused relational processing mind-set, and (c) the magnitude of resources allocated to processing. We find that contrast effects emerge when an ambiguous target product is positioned concretely, not abstractly, and consumers employ relational, not item-specific, processing. A framework clarifies how and when each of the aforementioned factors shapes context effects, often in ways never before seen. (c) 2007 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..

Shall I Tell You Now or Later? Assimilation and Contrast in the Evaluation of Experiential Products

“…Distinct information is separate from the target with clear boundaries, which makes it more likely to serve as a comparison standard for judging a target (Stapel and Winkielman 1998;Zhu and Meyers-Levy 2009). Indistinct information does not have clear boundaries, which makes it more likely that the information will be incorporated into the evaluation of the target (Kim and Meyers-Levy 2008;Stapel and Winkielman 1998). Thus, distinct information often results in contrast, whereas indistinct information often leads to assimilation.…”

Context Effects from Bodily Sensations: Examining Bodily Sensations Induced by Flooring and the Moderating Role of Product Viewing Distance

“…Most of this work concentrates on how characteristics of the contextually activated data may do this (e.g., its extremity [Herr 1986]; its distinctness [Stapel, Koomen, and Velthuijsen 1998]). More germane to our purposes, however, is evidence that the clarity of the mental representation that people form of the target item (i.e., how clearly they construe the item) also can exert such an influence (Kim and Meyers-Levy 2008;Schwarz and Bless 2007).…”

“…As such, these data are effectively incorporated in the person's mental representation of the target, prompting an assimilation effect on their initial impressions of the target. At the subsequent judgment stage, however, the poor definition of the target representation renders it too amorphous and vague to be meaningfully compared with any standard (Kim and Meyers-Levy 2008). Hence, a comparison process that might further refine the individual's initial impression of the target is unlikely to occur, causing the assimilation effect that emerged during encoding to remain intact on target assessments.…”

“…As noted earlier, the ensuing comparison process generally highlights differences between the target and standard, and this prompts a contrast effect on assessments. Hence, the target object is assessed more favorably when the implications of the contextual data (e.g., bodily sensation) are relatively negative rather than positive (Kim and Meyers-Levy 2008).…”

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“…In addition, there are other types of externalities created by an ad such as it's influence on the branding effectiveness of other advertisements [27,20].…”