The Effect of Brand Commitment on the Evaluation of Nonpreferred Brands: A Disconfirmation Process

Abstract

This research finds that high- and low-commitment consumers use different information-processing strategies when exposed to competitive brand information. High-commitment consumers use a disconfirmatory processing strategy, focusing on the dissimilarities between their preferred brand and the competitor brand. Low-commitment consumers focus on the similarities between the advertised brand and their preferred brand. These processing differences lead to differences in the evaluation of a competitive brand between high- and low-commitment consumers. However, priming high-commitment consumers to focus on the similarities and low-commitment consumers on the dissimilarities between their preferred brand and a competitor brand mitigates the effects of the different processing strategies. (c) 2008 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..

How do brand communities generate brand relationships? Intermediate mechanisms

“…Measures of brand identification rely on a six-item scale (Kim, Han, & Park, 2001;Mael & Ashforth, 1992) to assess consumers' cognitive links with the brand for self-expression. Brand commitment refers to consumers' desire to maintain their relationships with the brand, adapting a three-item scale (Raju, Unnava, & Montgomery, 2009). A new measure for "perceived community-brand similarity", which indicates the similarity between brand community characteristics and brand traits, including members' personality, values, and styles, develops following Churchill's (1979) suggestions.…”

When Good Consumers Turn Bad: Psychological Contract Breach in Committed Brand Relationships

“…In the first part, all participants in an undergraduate business subject pool completed a prescreening survey in which they indicated their commitment to their preferred hair salon/barber in addition to other product categories not connected with this study. Brand commitment was measured using a four‐item scale adapted from prior research (Ahluwalia et al., ; Raju et al., ): (a) If (brand) were not available at the store, it would bother me to choose another brand; (b) I consider myself to be highly loyal to (brand); (c) I would be very happy to use (brand) every time I have a need for (product category); (d) I enjoy talking about (brand) with my friends. Participants expressed their disagreement/agreement with each statement using a seven‐point scale.…”

To achieve or not to achieve? Comparative mindsets elicit assimilation and contrast in goal priming

“…If, however, judges adopt a difference focus and focus on ways in which target and standard differ from one another, then contrast occurs. Besides judgmental priming, the importance of these comparative processing mindsets is observable in diverse psychological domains in which comparisons play a causal role, such as self‐judgments (Häfner, ; Hanko, Crusius, & Mussweiler, ; Mussweiler, Rüter, & Epstude, ), group and person perception (Corcoran, Hundhammer, & Mussweiler, ; Corcoran & Mussweiler, ), emotional contagion (Epstude & Mussweiler, ), in evaluative conditioning (Corneille, Yzerbyt, Pleyers, & Mussweiler, ), product evaluations (Raju, Unnava, & Montgomery, ), or persuasion (Tormala & Clarkson, ). What we propose has not been shown for goal priming yet, but such effects have, for example, been found for specific performance standards (Bittner, ; Haddock, Macrae, & Fleck, ), and this lends credibility to our assumption that the direction of goal priming effects might also depend on whether a focus on similarities vs. differences is activated.…”