Consumer Behavior

Overview | Consumer Behavior | Pricing and Consumer Dynamics | Distribution Channels | Determinants of Brand Shares

"Consuming with Others: Social Influences on Evaluations of an Experience"

Ann McGill, Sears Roebuck Professor of General Management, Marketing, and Behavioral Science, Chicago GSB; Suresh Ramanathan, Assistant Professor of Marketing, Chicago GSB

Summary: The authors explore how consuming with others, for example, watching a movie, differs from consuming alone. Gathering data on the moment-to-moment evaluation of an experience and the overall retrospective evaluation, they find that moment-to-moment judgments by people who consume together begin to oscillate in a shared pattern of evaluation over broad frequency ranges more so than narrow ranges. This suggests that people maintain their own idiosyncratic reactions to specific components of the experience but their evaluations move up and down together in broad or low frequency sweeps. Such an effect is similar to the pattern of two businesses that may have differing sales from day to day (narrow intervals) but nevertheless move together across seasons or the business cycle (broad intervals). Perhaps most interestingly, consumers whose judgments were tightly entwined with others liked the experience more than those whose moment-to-moment reactions did not co-vary with those of another person.

“Between Two Brands: A Goal Fluency Account of Brand Evaluation”

Aparna Labroo, Assistant Professor of Marketing, Chicago GSB; Angela Y. LeeM, Professor, Northwestern University

Summary: Labroo has a program of research into how the order in which consumers view ads may affect their evaluation. In this project, Labroo finds consumers’ evaluation of an advertised brand can be influenced by prior advertising of products from related categories. In particular, the authors find greater purchase intent and brand evaluation when the type of goal serviced by the product in the prior ad (focused on preventing problems versus promoting advancement in well-being)matches the goal serviced by the target product. The authors trace the beneficial effects of matching goals to consumers’ greater fluency (a type of cognitive facility) in processing the second advertisement.