Automatic Effects of Brand Exposure on Motivated Behavior - Management Assignment Help

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People see thousands of brand images in an average day. Given how ubiquitous brands have become in people’s everyday lives, it is important that research uncovers the ways in which brand exposure can affect behavior. Although brands are of significant interest to consumer researchers, scant empirical work has addressed the potential behavioral consequences of brand exposure, inside or outside of the consumer decision-making context. And yet, given that consumers encounter many more brands than people in an average day, brands have surely become more psychologically meaningful than the existing empirical work would suggest. Our first objective is to investigate whether behavioral priming effects translate from the social to consumer do- *Gra´inne M. Fitzsimons is Canada Research Chair in Social Cognition at the University of Waterloo, 200 University Ave West, Waterloo, ON, N2L 3G1 (grainne@uwaterloo.ca). Tanya L. Chartrand is professor of marketing and psychology at Duke University, Durham, NC 27708 (tlc10@duke.edu). Gavan J. Fitzsimons is professor of marketing and psychology at Duke University, Durham, NC 27708 (gavan@duke.edu). The authors acknowledge the helpful input of the editor, associate editor, and reviewers. This research was supported in part by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Canadian Foundation for Innovation to Gra´inne M. Fitzsimons and from grant R03MH65250 from the National Institute of Mental Health to Tanya L. Chartrand. We would like to thank Jamie Kendall, Kwan-Kit Lui, and Sylvia Yu for their assistance with data collection and participants at the Sandage Symposium at the University of Illinois for helpful comments. John Deighton served as editor and Baba Shiv served as associate editor for this article. Electronically published March 4, 2008 main. Can brand primes elicit effects on behavior in the same fashion as can person primes? Our second objective is to understand underlying mechanisms. If brand primes can shape behavior, what is the process by which they elicit their effects? On the one hand, because brands are thought to be linked to personality traits, they may elicit cognitively based behavioral effects, as do person representations. On the other hand, brands are symbols of aspirations, representing desired self-qualities, such as sophistication or power. Thus, brand priming may well activate goals linked with these desired outcomes and thus elicit goal-directed behavior. This article seeks evidence for brand priming effects and uses novel methods to a priori predict the conditions under which each type of process pathway should be expected. Behavioral Priming in the Social Domain Research in social psychology has emphasized the important effects that can stem from the “priming” or situational activation of mental constructs, demonstrating that environmental cues, even subtly presented, can have powerful effects on behavior (Bargh, Chen, and Burrows 1996; Bargh et al. 2001). Although most behavioral priming research has focused on the direct activation of a mental construct via exposure to related words (e.g., priming participants with words related to rudeness leads them to behave rudely; Bargh et al. 1996), a burgeoning set of research has examined the effects of environmental cues encountered in 22 JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH everyday life, such as stereotyped group members and significant others. For example, exposure to a stereotyped other can guide complex behavior in line with information embedded in the stereotype: people primed with the elderly walked more slowly (Bargh et al. 1996) and displayed poorer memory (Dijksterhuis, Bargh, and Miedema 2000). Familiar others can also elicit these automatic effects, in line with relational information embedded in the significant other representation (Andersen, Reznik, and Manzella 1996; Fitzsimons and Bargh 2003; Shah 2003). For example, students subliminally primed with their father outperformed control participants on an achievement test if they believed their fathers would be interested in their success (Shah 2003). Importantly, these behavioral priming effects are known to result from automatic processes requiring no effort, intentionality, or awareness. Participants possess no awareness of the effect of the prime on their behavior or of the activation of the primed construct. Primes are often presented subliminally, showing that such effects can result even when participants are unaware of the primes themselves (Shah 2003). A number of underlying mechanisms have been proposed to account for behavioral priming effects, including purely passive, cognitive accounts (Bargh et al. 1996; Dijksterhuis and Bargh 2001); purely goal-driven, motivational accounts (Bargh et al. 2001; Chartrand and Bargh 1996); and accounts that integrate cognitive and motivational processes (Kay and Ross 2003; Smeesters et al. 2003; Wheeler and Petty 2001). The most prominent account of behavioral priming effects has emphasized the role of activated cognitive constructs (Dijksterhuis and Bargh 2001). According to this account, constructs associated with the primed representation guide behavior through a direct perception-behavior link, when people’s behavior mirrors a perceived construct (Dijksterhuis and Bargh 2001). For example, because people’s mental representation of the elderly is linked to the construct “slow,” when people are primed with the elderly, “slow” is also activated and, because of links to behavioral representations, leads to an increased likelihood that the corresponding behavior will result (i.e., people will walk more slowly; Dijksterhuis and Bargh 2001). In addition to this cognitively based account, recent research has emphasized the role of activated motivational constructs in producing these effects. Because goals are theorized to be represented mentally as are other cognitive constructs (Bargh 1990; Hull 1931; Kruglanski 1996; Tolman 1932), they can be activated by situational cues and then operate automatically to shape behavior. For example, for students who hope to please their mothers by achieving, mother priming causes the goal “to achieve” to become active, leading them to perform better on a test (Fitzsimons and Bargh 2003). As for the process through which a primed goal causes increased performance, research has suggested that activated goals cause goal means (ways to achieve the goal) to become more accessible (Shah, Kruglanski, and Friedman 2002). That is, when a goal becomes active, means to achieving that goal also become active, which then go on to shape behavior. In an achievement context, for example, means that may become active are “to concentrate” and “to ignore distractions.” Goal-based accounts of behavioral priming effects are novel and have received empirical support in a small but growing number of recent papers (Aarts et al. 2005; Bargh et al. 2001; Chartrand and Bargh 1996; Custers and Aarts 2005b).

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