Chapter 12 Chapter Summary

Chapter Overview:

Chapter 12 discusses how marketing utilizes what we know about memory, how advertising can change people’s memories, and how memory is related to political issues. We develop brand preference largely based on familiarity (based mainly on our implicit memories). Companies often market their products to infants and toddlers, sometimes even before birth, to create brand loyalty. Strong evidence supports the notion that young children will prefer products that they are familiar with and this loyalty will last for years.

Research has also revealed that advertising can affect the memories of our experiences with a product. Even if the actual experience with a product was negative, post-event advertising can make us recall the experience as positive. As a result, advertisements can have a larger impact on sales than product quality, and brand-name products will always be judged as better quality. 

Advertisements that encourage people to remember (or imagine) an event can alter autobiographical memories. For example, research has shown that exposure to ads can make people recall meeting a character at a theme park that could not have been there and increase their confidence in memories of visiting a theme park they were originally unsure of. Because memory is malleable, advertisements can distort memories so that the altered memories are false and/or more positive than the reality.

While many marketing studies focus on the explicit recall of ads, it is highly likely that implicit memories guide many of our consumer decisions. Real-life consumer decisions typically involve a delay between the exposure to the ad and the purchase of the product as well as divided attention during the ad exposure. Explicit memory is affected by delays and divided attention, but implicit memory is not. Shapiro and Krishnan (2001) used tests of explicit and implicit memory of ads as well as the process-dissociation procedure (a procedure used to estimate conscious and automatic contributions to retrieval). Their results confirm the importance of implicit memory in purchasing decisions. Of course, explicit memory is also used but only in purchases where consumers actively scan their memory for their knowledge of a product and this effect tends to be more likely in high-involvement purchases. When people are shopping for low-involvement purchases, they are more likely to rely on implicit memory. These results have implications for effective marketing campaigns. For high-involvement purchases, most ads should be placed in magazines or on televisions where consumers are more likely to give the ads their full attention. Also, these ads should be presented many times to ensure the delay between viewing the ad and making the purchase is as short as possible. For low-involvement purchases that rely more on implicit memory, maximum exposure to ads regardless of the quality is most effective. In general advertisers might benefit in knowing what type of memory, explicit, implicit or both, that is most likely to influence consumers decisions on a particular product.

The research on advertisement repetition on attitudes has yielded conflicting results: some suggest three exposures are enough to affect attitudes while other research indicates that more than three exposures are necessary. A meta-analysis of the existing research revealed an inverted U-shaped curve of advertising exposure to attitudes. The initial period of wear-in had a positive influence on attitudes to about ten repetitions after which a period of wear-out started a trend toward more negative attitudes towards the product. The effect of repetition was increased when the exposures were spaced over out over time. The meta-analysis also examined repetition on recall and found that increased repetition improved recall up to a point and then leveled off. Recall improved more dramatically when exposures were close together. In order to improve both attitude and recall, it might be wise to expose consumers to multiple clusters of advertisements.

Political campaigns are also a form of marketing that rely on memory. Two issues were reviewed: what impact, if any, scandals had on political issues and the impact of memory on voting decisions. Scandals make people pay more attention to a political candidate and this additional attention seems to result in better memory of the candidate’s policies. The better memory in turn appears to create a polarizing effect on attitudes with some evaluations becoming more negative and others more positive. Research also indicated that when scandals evoke an emotional response, memory of the issue is better regardless of the actual emotion induced. Research supports the notion that people keep a tally of political candidates that increases or decreases as information becomes available and that this tally can impact voter choices; however, the explicit recall of campaign information has a stronger impact on voter choice.

Learning Objectives:

Having read this chapter, you will be able to do the following:

1. Describe how brand preferences can develop in very young children.
2. Explain how advertisements affect a person’s memory of a product’s features.
3. Explain how advertisements can impact autobiographical memories.
4. Compare and contrast explicit and implicit memories for advertisements.
5. Predict response to advertisements viewed in full- and divided-attention conditions.
6. Describe the effect of repetition on recall for advertisements and explain how this may impact marketing of a product.
7. Explain how a political scandal impacts memory for a candidate’s political promises.
8. Describe the ways in which memory impact voter decisions.