Implicit measures of consumer cognition: A review

Abstract

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...

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