Spreading activation in advertising

A spreading activation model of consumer's asymmetric similarity judgment is proposed. The model, if validated by empirical data, could lead to many interesting implications in the area of consumer's memory of brands and choice process. Firstly, it directly impacts on the contents of a consumer's evoked set. It seems that because of differential activation capabilities of less salient and more salient brands the composition of evoked set will depend on the 'cue' brand.

If the cue brand is less salient then the probability of recall of more salient brand will be high and so will be its probability of being a member of the evoked set. On the other hand, if the cue brand is more salient then the probability of recall, and hence membership in evoked set, of a less salient brand will be low.

Secondly, if according to this model priming has an important role to play in similarity judgment then an area of automatic and controlled similarity judgment might evolve. Posner and Snyder had shown that automatic priming precedes controlled processes. Thus, one may argue that in a low involvement choice process, where controlled processes are not dominant, automatic activation of brands may determine the similarity judgments among brands.

This similarity judgment will in turn influence the choice. On the other hand, in a high involvement choice process, where controlled processes dominate, the automatic activation of brands will not determine the similarity judgments among brands and, consequently, the choice may turn out to be very different. Finally, this automatic or controlled similarity judgment may also impact brand substitution and brand switching behavior.

Ashcraft, M. Balota, D. Bettman, J. Chang, T. Collins, A. Gardner, M. Hunt, ed. Green, P. Herr, Paul M. Johnson, M. Chicago: American Marketing Association. Loftus, E. Meyer, D. San Francisco: Freeman. Neely, J. Posner, M. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Reder, L. Shepard, R. Smith, E. Stanovich, K. Tversky, A. Rosch and B. Bahn, University of Texas at Arlington. Becoming an Association for Consumer Research member is simple.

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Featured E3. Having Power, Giving More? Join ACR now! I have just primed you. Before you even finished reading the word above, you had things popping into your mind. Perhaps it was a snippet of song. Perhaps it was grainy black and white footage of the Ed Sullivan show appearance. The activation of your working memory pulls associated concepts from your long-term memory to create a mental construct that creates your internal definition of whatever that first label was.

Now, an important second step may or may not happen. But if that prime is strong enough to establish a firm grip on your attention, then you have a choice to make. Is your internal representation complete, or do you require more information?

If you require more information then you have to turn to external sources for that information. Believe it or not, this column is not intended as a primer in Cognitive Psych. About Us.

Business Courses. Quizzes test your expertise in business and Skill tests evaluate your management traits. Related Content. All Business Sections. Write for Us. Share this Page on:. It has also been found that the activation spreads beyond directly related concepts, although this 'mediated priming' effect is only evidenced in a pronunciation task Balota and Lorch Although not in the context of spreading activation, priming paradigm has also been used in the area of consumer behavior.

Thus, Herr , Meyers-Levy b and Yi have documented the impact of priming on consumer information processing and judgment. This study will, however, use priming in order to model similarity judgment tasks. The theoretical analysis of similarity relations in marketing has been dominated by geometric models in which products, or brands, are represented by points in some coordinate space where the metric distance between the points reflect the similarities between respective brands Green and Rao One result of such a dimensional representation is that the similarity between brand 'a' and 'b' or Euclidean distance between them remains the same whether one measures similarity of 'a' to 'b' or of 'b' to 'a'.

Tversky has, however, argued that the metric assumption that underlie the geometric approach to similarity are often found lacking. He has developed an alternative feature-based approach to the analysis of similarity relations. According to his 'contrast' model, each brand is characterized by a set of features or attributes. For example, coke has attributes of being a carbonated drink, a cola drink, among others.

The observed similarity between two brands is expressed as a function of their common and distinctive attributes. Thus, if brand 'a' e. The model allows for a variety of similarity relations over the same set of objects through its flexibility of designating different values for q , a , b as well as different functions f. Thus, in contrast to the dimensional model, similarity of 'a' to 'b' can be different from similarity of 'b' to 'a'. The factors that contribute to the salience of a stimulus, i.

Variations in similarity judgments because of the 'task' or 'context' effects are captured by the parameters q , a , and b. Tversky and his colleagues have published a few papers lending support to the contrast model. For example, Tversky and Gati have used the contrast model to explain asymmetric similarity judgments.

They have shown that subjects' judged similarity of North Korea to China exceeds their judged similarity of China to North Korea.

In a consumption context, Johnson has found that consumers rated the similarity of shasta cola to coca cola to be higher than the similarity of coca cola to shasta cola. Thus, coke is not as similar to shasta as shasta is to coke. Tversky and Gati explain this asymmetry via a focusing hypothesis and a relative salience effect in their contrast model. The focusing hypothesis states that if S a,b is interpreted as the degree to which 'a' subject is similar to 'b' referent then in such judgments attributes of 'a' are weighted more heavily than attributes of 'b' i.

The salience effect follows from the contrast model. While the explanation provided by Tversky and Gati is reasonable, however, it is not grounded in the memory network models. For example, how are 'subject' and 'referent' cognitivly represented and how features or attributes are given more weight than less. In the following section a memory network model of asymmetric similarity judgment is presented.

Assume that 'a' e. This node is linked to many attributes like carbonated, refreshing, dark color, sweet taste, distinctive bottle, etc. If A is the set of these attributes of coke then node 'Coke' has A different links emanating from it. Similarly, node 'b' e. Thus, the network structure might be represented as in Figure 1. The focusing hypothesis of Tversky and Gati is proposed to be captured by a priming effect. According to Tversky and Gati when coke is the subject and shasta the referent, then the attributes of coke are weighted more heavily than the attributes of shasta.

However, they also suggest that human subjects have a propensity to use directional statements such as "x is like y" where the subject 'x' always comes before the referent 'y' in similarity statements. A case can be made that the subject 'x' is acting as a prime for the referent 'y'. Thus, in a similarity estimation of coke to shasta, it is proposed that coke acts as a prime for shasta. The salience of a stimulus depends on factors which include intensity, familiarity, frequency, informational content among others Tversky and Gati All of these factors may safely be assumed to give rise to two phenomenon.

Firstly, they will increase the steady state level of activation of a node Anderson Secondly, they will increase the number of links emanating from a node as well as their strengths Collins and Loftus Thus in the previous diagram, coke is more salient than shasta coke has more links than shasta.