The authors find that U.S. consumers hold contradictory notions of what characterizes a global brand beyond its wide recognition, availability, and standardization across markets. In particular, they find that the association of brand globality with higher quality is not as strong as the literature has proposed and that affect directly influences how people perceive global brands. The initial results imply that previous research on globality effects may have confounded brand globality and brand strength and that the latter is responsible for the quality effect. A follow-up study shows that for most consumers, brand globality is associated with positive affect and that this affect is also reflected among consumers who are explicitly against global brands. The authors conclude that response to global brands is driven more by affect and less by cognition.Marketing and brand managers in companies whose market offerings span multiple cultures and borders are faced with the difficult task of coordinating resources and strategies to serve broad global markets profitably. In addition to this challenge, many are unsure about what the globality of their brands means to their consumers or even whether this globality is a brand attribute that should be mentioned or perhaps concealed in marketing communications. Academic research on the topic is modestly informative. Several recent studies have provided some evidence of a positive relationship between the perceived globality of a brand and its perceptions of quality (Holt, Quelch, and Taylor 2004), prestige (Steenkamp, Batra, and Alden 2003), and esteem (Johansson and Ronkainen 2004). Even when other factors are controlled for, researchers have argued that this global brand effect influences brand purchase intentions through higher quality and status ratings (Steenkamp, Batra, and Alden 2003).What the global brand effect actually consists of is still unclear. Holt, Quelch, and Taylor (2004) suggest two important factors, global myth and social responsibility, whereas others suggest cosmopolitanism and the desire to belong to a global community (Alden, Steenkamp, and Batra 1999;Kapferer 1997). Attractive as such benefits might be, it is difficult to find evidence that consumers actually consider globality as captured by these dimensions in their marketplace choices. There is strong evidence that individual consumers in developing countries choose global brands regardless of merit for conspicuous consumption or aspirational reasons (Batra et al. 2000;Holt, Quelch, and Taylor 2004). In more mature markets, however, it is likely that "the consumer does not buy a global brand per se, but on the contrary, individualistic

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In line with recent methodological advances from the cognitive and social psychology literature, consumer researchers have shown strong interest in addressing the nonconscious nature of consumer information processing, attitude formation, and behavioral response. The related use of implicit measures in the study of a variety of marketing effects has offered novel insights into consumer perception of, and response to, marketing stimuli. This paper highlights conceptual issues and empirical findings on the topic of implicit consumer cognition and examines the incremental value that implicit measures may bring to the field. The review suggests that while the use of implicit measures in consumer research is still in its infancy, it shows significant promise as a methodological tool. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.The recent development and use of a variety of measures designed to capture individuals' implicit social cognitions has naturally spilled over into the consumer psychology field. Yet with every novel methodological development, questions arise about the proper understanding of the conceptual issues underlying the new measures and implications regarding their practical application. These concerns are all the more relevant to the marketing area, which has only cautiously begun to adopt some of these measures in the hope of achieving a better understanding of the way consumers process and respond to marketing stimuli. This is indeed new territory. For example, the Simonson et al. of implicit social cognition. In 2002, Bargh made a passionate plea for new work that was needed concerning automatic influences on consumer judgment, behavior, and motivation.Proposing that consumer contexts are indeed conducive to automatic processing effects, Fitzsimons et al. (2002) reviewed accumulating evidence for the enhanced role of nonconscious influences on consumer responses ranging from perception and memory to affect and choice. Dijksterhuis et al. (2005) further argued for the role of the unconscious in the routine behavior of consumers and proposed that much of it involves automatic goal pursuit. According to these authors, conceptual accounts emphasizing conscious and thorough information processing are unable to account for a large part of consumer choices, and in fact the vast majority of choices are "not the result of much information processing at all" (Dijksterhuis et al., 2005). Instead, they involve decisions that are contextually or environmentally cue-induced and either engage automatically activated attitudes or are completely devoid of deliberate attitude processing. These aspects are critical because the validity of explicit measures is negatively affected by respondents' lack of a particular attitude, their inability to access it, or their unwillingness to share information about it with researchers (Perkins et al., 2008).In a consumption landscape largely determined by nonconscious influences, implicit measures would seem to be potentially useful tools for detecting consumers' "true" responses. In...

Previous cross-cultural research has demonstrated a consistently positive effect of brand globality on consumer perceptions, attitudes, and purchase intentions. The authors evaluate these effects on three ethnic segments of U.S. consumers. Drawing on survey data analysis and the estimates of a structural equation model, the research shows that associations with global brands as a general category vary across ethnic groups. Caucasian consumers show less of an appreciation of global brands, whereas African Americans and Hispanics show patterns similar to those in prior research. Although the average consumer views brand globality as an attribute of little importance, the structural equation findings show a direct effect of globality on attitudes and purchases. Overall, mainstream consumers in the United States are less favorable toward global brands than minority groups but patronize them at the same overall rate.

Polysemous brand slogans have multiple meanings that may convey several product attributes. We build on extant research by suggesting that some consumers automatically access multiple meanings of a polysemous brand slogan, whereas others access only a single, immediately available meaning. A novel measure of automatic access to secondary meaning (the Secondary Meaning Access via the Automatic Route Test, or SMAART) is developed to capture this individual difference and show its consequences for consumer responses to polysemous slogans with unfavorable secondary meanings. The automatic-access account is further validated by employing the Implicit Association Test (Greenwald, McGhee, and Schwartz), suggesting that the unconscious impact of polysemous brand slogans can be more influential than intuitively expected. (c) 2007 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..

The associative network model of memory proposes that each node (construct) belongs to specific networks of associations. These networks include nodes that share associations with a third (common) construct but are not themselves directly associated (merely associated nodes). The present research proposes that automatic associations between such indirectly related nodes can be primed in a single exposure and this may be sufficient to alter subsequent concept evaluations. An implicit cognition measure is used to demonstrate the automatic transfer of properties (both cognitive evaluations and affective responses) from a common associative node to seemingly unrelated objects. The effect is driven by individuals' inability to ignore activated but irrelevant associations. Results also show that the mere association effect and the underlying property transfer process (1) are more likely for consumers familiar with the concepts involved, (2) involve both cognitive and affective information, and (3) counterintuitively, occur more often for concepts from different categories rather than the same category.

It is proposed that targeting strategies that are incongruent with existing advertising schemata due to unusual use of identity cues can increase the salience of particular self-identifications and influence consumer response to advertising targeting specific audiences. In an experiment, Hispanic and Anglo consumers were exposed to one of two versions of a Hispanic-targeted advertisement. The two versions were identical except that the first version featured an English-language voice-over (congruent with existing advertising schemata) whereas the second version featured a Spanish-language voice-over with English subtitles (incongruent with existing advertising schemata). Experimental participants were more likely to spontaneously report their ethnicity in self-descriptions (a measure of ethnic selfawareness) if they were exposed to the schema-incongruent ad than if they were exposed to the schema-congruent ad. Ad schema congruity also moderated the impact of target market membership on consumer attitudes toward the spokesperson and advertising.

A lthough product modularity is often advocated as a design strategy in the operations management literature, little is known about how consumers respond to modular products. In this research we undertake several experiments to explore consumer response to modularly upgradeable products in settings featuring technological change. We consider both the initial product choice (between a modularly upgradeable product and an integral one) and the subsequent upgrade decision (replacement of a module versus full product replacement). First, we show that consumers tend to discount the cost savings associated with modular upgrades excessively (insufficiently) when the time between the initial purchase and the upgrade is short (long). This suggests that modular upgradability as a product feature has higher profit potential for slowly rather than rapidly improving products. Second, we observe a preference reversal between the initial purchase and the point of upgrade: At the point of initial purchase, people foresee making a full product replacement in the future, yet, when faced with the actual upgrade decision, they are more likely to revert to modular upgrades. Finally, we discuss and test several pricing and product design strategies that the firm can use to respond to these cognitive biases.