To search the Kilts Center website, enter key word(s), and click "Go".
Antonia Kronlund
Antonia Kronlund worked alongside Bruce Whittlesea. She received her PhD from Simon Fraser University, Canada in June, 2006. She also holds an MA from Simon Fraser, and a BSc from the University of Toronto.
Broadly, her research interests center on understanding factors that affect consumer memory for brands and the evaluation of brands. For example, several papers in psychology demonstrate that feelings of familiarity affect attitudes positively. Antonia's research focuses on how and why it is that consumers develop the feeling of familiarity towards a brand name. As part of her dissertation, she developed various techniques which allow one to examine feelings of familiarity towards brand names. She is also interested in why people are prone to falsely remember that they have encountered a brand name previously, either on one prior occasion, or on multiple prior occasions (e.g., a given brand was not shown recently, but people erroneously believed it was).
For example, she has shown that exposing participants to names of various makes of vehicles (e.g., Ford, GM, Honda, etc.) causes participants to erroneously believe that they have seen the most popular competitor (e.g., Toyota), but not a less popular competitor (e.g., Mazda). Her proposed explanation for such observations is that people develop and use norms on the fly, based on the context, current expectations, and intuitive theories of cause and effect. When brand names come to mind more easily than expected (i.e., they are processed fluently), creating a feeling of surprise, people believe that they have experienced the current brand, event, or situation in the past, or on many prior occasions in the past. This experience of surprising fluency is also a potent source of learning; brands encountered in ads which allow the given brand to be experienced in the context of surprising fluency will be more likely to be remembered on a subsequent occasion.
Antonia started as Assistant Professor in the Department of Marketing, International Business and Strategy at Brock University in Canada in July 2006.
