Too much of a good thing? Consumer response to strategic changes in brand image

The current research investigates a potential disadvantage of building brand associations that resonate with consumers' identities and facilitate consumer–brand bonding. The authors propose a theory of consumer response to changes that either dampen or augment the associations central to brand image (e.g., due to brand acquisitions or repositioning). The results show that consumers with a high degree of self–brand connection respond more negatively than others do to changes that dampen brand associations. Counterintuitively, changes augmenting brand associations can also lead to unfavorable consumer sentiments in certain instances. When brand connection was linked to an ideal self-identity (i.e., self-enhancement motives), changes that augmented the brand image increased the brand's ability to signal an ideal identity. Conversely, when brand connection was linked to the actual self-identity (i.e., self-verification motives), augmenting brand image reduced the perceived similarity between the self and the brand, thus causing brand identification to deteriorate.     

Same Service,Different Ad Claims: The Moderating Role of Need for Cognition

Advertisers can choose among different ad claims when framing commercial messages about a new service offer. Two alternative ad claims are functional ad claims, focusing on product or service attributes and benefits, and experiential ad claims, focusing on future experiences with the product or service. This article proposes that different ad claims evoke different memory structures (semantic vs. episodic), and that different memory structures require different types of cognitive processing (system 1 vs. system 2). In two experiments using need for cognition as a dispositional trait of level of cognitive processing, this article shows that a new service entrant with experiential ad claims will be less favorably evaluated when consumers engage in more effortful, or system 2, processing, than when consumers engage in less effortful processing (system 1). For functional claims, however, the evaluation of the new service does not differ between the two types of cognitive processing (system 1 vs. system 2).