M ODELO DE N EGOCIO

The most successful brands are those that have created strong associations between the brand and positive images and concepts (for example, Hallmark and caring, Volvo and safety). Firms spend millions of dollars developing and reinforcing these associations.

Further, research by Aaker and colleagues (for example, Aaker, 1997; Aaker et al., 2001;

Aaker et al., 2004) indicates that consumers attribute human personality characteristics to brands, characteristics that arise from the associations created by marketers. Aaker (1997) proposed a framework to identify and measure five key characteristics of brands:

sincerity, ruggedness, sophistication, excitement and competence. These perceptions of personality characteristics are prevalent across cultures (Aaker et al., 2001). Not only do consumers identify these characteristics, they also respond to brands as if they possessed these humanlike characteristics. Aaker et al. (2004) showed that consumers felt more com-mitment to brands that were perceived as sincere than to brands perceived as exciting. But they responded more negatively to transgressions by the sincere brands, suggesting that consumers had developed links between these brands and expectations of responsibility and reliability.

Brand knowledge, including these associations, is stored in memory, resulting in the existence of an overarching brand knowledge structure that links all of its relevant brand associations. Research in automaticity has provided evidence that knowledge structures and their corresponding associations can be activated, and, once activated, influence sub-sequent judgments and behaviors to be in line with the activated concepts. This suggests that brand knowledge structures, like other knowledge structures, can be activated and hence influence judgments and behaviors corresponding to the activated associations. The

automaticity literature indicates that such activation may occur via three routes that invoke the cognitive, evaluative and motivational systems, respectively (see Bargh, 1997;

Bargh and Chartrand, 1999). Which route is in play determines the nature of the subse-quent influence.

Cognitive Route

Within a brand context, the cognitive route of influence involves semantic activation of associations to the brand name (Anderson and Bower, 1973). As a result, preferences and subsequent behavior are influenced such that they are guided by these activated associ-ations. This activation is a purely cognitive process. An example of a cognitive process can be found in Shapiro et al. (1997), who provide evidence that incidental exposure to an ad increases the likelihood that the product depicted in that ad will be included in a consid-eration set. The authors asked participants to read an article in the center column of what presumably was a magazine page on the computer screen. Participants believed that they would be tested on their memory and comprehension of the article. In the experimental condition, the target ads were placed outside of participants’ focal view in the left column of the screen. No ads were shown in the control condition. The findings indicate that this peripheral placement of the ad resulted in an increased inclusion of the product in the consideration set even though participants did not process the ad attentively and did not recollect ever having seen it.

Evaluative Route

Evaluations, including global judgments as to whether an object is good or bad, were tra-ditionally assumed to be made consciously and intentionally. In fact, models of attitude formation and of the evaluative process hold that one weighs the positive and negative features of the attitude object and with intention and deliberation makes a decision about how one feels about it. However, prodded by Zajonc’s (1980) famous challenge to this position – that ‘preferences need no inferences’ – a substantial body of evidence has accu-mulated that one’s evaluations often become activated directly, without one needing to think about them, or even be aware that one has just classified the attitude object as good or bad. Instead, just the mere presence of the attitude object is sufficient to cause the cor-responding evaluation. The mere exposure phenomenon is an example of such an evalu-ative route affecting preferences. Zajonc (1968) showed that mere exposure to a novel stimulus is a sufficient condition for generating increased liking for that stimulus. In one of Zajonc’s initial studies, he exposed participants to Chinese characters, varying the fre-quency of exposure. Participants were later shown the same characters and asked to indi-cate how ‘good’ they thought the meaning of the character to be. Zajonc found that as the frequency of exposure increased, so too did the favorable evaluations, although the marginal increase with each subsequent exposure began to decrease after approximately 12 exposures. Many studies since then have replicated this effect (for a review see Bornstein, 1989). Effects of mere exposure have been found when participants are aware as well as unaware that stimuli have been presented (Bornstein et al., 1987; Kunst-Wilson and Zajonc, 1980). However, the effects appear more potent when people are unaware of having been exposed to the stimuli (Bornstein, 1989). Thus, conscious awareness of the

stimuli is not necessary to attain the positive effects of repeated exposure. Generally, the mere exposure research has involved exposure to novel stimuli such as Chinese ideo-graphs, polynomials, unfamiliar words or unfamiliar faces.

Janiszewski (1988, 1990, 1993) examined mere exposure in the consumption domain, specifically focusing on incidental processing of fictitious brand name information.

Janiszewski defined incidental exposure as exposure devoid of any intentional effort to process the brand information. In his studies, participants were given a study instrument meant to resemble a real newspaper. Participants were asked to read an article with the target brand advertisement presented peripherally to that article. The results across this stream of research indicate that incidental exposure to a brand name resulted in more favorable evaluations of that brand. This effect was enhanced when the presented stimuli matched the relative lateralized processing strength of the brain (that is, an incidental pic-toral exposure will have a greater impact if presented in the left (versus right) peripheral visual field).

Can mere exposure influence choice? Ferraro et al. (forthcoming) examined whether repeated exposure to known stimuli, the Dasani brand, could extend beyond positive evaluation to actual choice behavior. Given that consumers are repeatedly exposed to the same brands in their daily interactions with others, the authors hypothesized that incidental repeated exposure to other consumers using a given brand could lead to increased choice of that brand. Further, they hypothesized that the type of person that comes to be associated with using that brand moderates the frequency of exposure effect. The authors presented participants with 20 photos of undergraduate students engaged in everyday activities such as waiting for the bus or eating lunch. They manip-ulated whether zero, four or 12 of these photos contained a Dasani bottled water near the focal individual, such that it appeared that the focal individual had chosen that brand.

After viewing the photos, the authors told participants that as a ‘thank you’ for their participation in the study they would receive a bottle of water and they were given a choice of four brands, including Dasani. The results indicated that choice of Dasani increased with the number of exposures to the brand in the photos. However, this effect was limited to only those participants who were not aware that they had been exposed to the Dasani in the photos. The authors further showed that associating a brand and a type of user can moderate this frequency of exposure effect.

Motivational Route

The third method through which incidental brand exposure may influence behavior is goal priming. Goals are desired end-states and thus motivational in nature. By their very definition, it seems a necessary condition that goals be consciously available and that behavior is consciously directed to achieving those goals. However, Bargh (1990) pro-posed that goal activation and pursuit could occur without conscious awareness and intention. The repeated activation and pursuit of goals in specific environmental contexts can lead to their automatization, resulting in the possibility that environmental features could activate goals and their subsequent pursuit without conscious awareness or intent.

Just as with intentional goal activation, once a goal has been non-consciously activated, the individual will pursue actions that allow him or her to move towards achieving that

goal. However, the individual will not have any awareness that the goal was activated or that he or she took actions to achieve that goal. In one of the early papers showing non-conscious goal priming, Chartrand and Bargh (1996) asked participants to complete a scrambled sentence task as a means of supraliminally priming one group with an impres-sion formation goal and one group with a memorization goal. In an ostensibly unrelated second study, participants then read 24 behavioral statements that described behaviors in four different trait categories. Participants primed with the impression formation goal recalled more behaviors than those primed with the memorization goal, replicating earlier findings using explicit experimenter instructions to memorize or form an impression.

Further, they showed more organization of the material in memory. Importantly, the par-ticipants did not realize that they had the goal or that it was driving their information processing.

Bargh et al. (2001) showed that goals can be activated without conscious awareness and operate to effectively guide behavior. In one study, participants were given a high perfor-mance goal or no goal using a word search puzzle. Participants were asked to locate 13 explicitly provided words. Six of the words were neutral and did not vary across condi-tions. In the high performance goal condition, the seven remaining words were related to the concept of high performance (for example, succeed, achieve). In the neutral priming condition, these seven words were neutral in nature (for example, ranch, carpet). The authors measured performance using three additional word search puzzles, for which participants were not given the list of words to look for. As predicted, participants in the high performance goal condition found a greater number of words compared to the participants in the neutral priming condition.

In study 2, Bargh et al. (2001) primed the goal of cooperation versus no goal. In addi-tion, the authors manipulated whether participants were given an explicit cooperation goal or not. Two participants completed the study at the same time. The cooperation goal was primed using a scrambled sentence task. In this task, participants were asked to create 4-word sentences from sets offive words. In the cooperation goal condition, 10 of the 30 sets contained words related to cooperation. In the no-goal condition, all 30 word sets were neutral with respect to cooperation. Participants then completed a resource-dilemma task in which they could harvest from a common resource pool that had to be replenished periodically (that is,fishing from a lake with a limited number of fish). The dependent measure was the amount of resource returned. After the scrambled sentence task, participants read the instructions for the resource task. The conscious cooperation goal participants were then given additional instructions stating that it was important that both participants cooperate and were told to set themselves the following goal, ‘I intend to cooperate as much as possible.’ Both the priming and the conscious goal conditions produced cooperative behavior. There was greater cooperation when participants were given the explicit conscious goal to cooperate. Importantly, participants in the no-conscious goal condition showed an increase in cooperation due to goal priming just as did participants in the conscious-goal condition.

It is important to distinguish between goal priming and semantic activation. Semantic activation does not have motivational qualities, while non-conscious goal pursuit does.

Once a goal has been activated it persists over time until the individual achieves that goal.

Motivational states increase in strength over time, and goal-directed individuals will persist in spite of obstacles or interruptions (Atkinson and Birch, 1970). Semantic

activation of concepts, on the other hand, is a cognitive state and decreases in strength over time. Therefore, semantic activation dissipates in a relatively short period. Evidence for this comes from inserting a delay between the priming task and the relevant depen-dent measures.

In order to test this, Bargh et al. (2001) examined the effects of priming a high per-formance goal with and without a delay between the priming task and measurement of the dependent variable. A high performance goal or no goal was activated using word-search puzzles. The delay manipulation involved asking participants to draw their family tree. Two dependent variables were used; one perceptual and one behavioral in nature. For the perceptual measure, participants were asked to read a behavioral description of a target person (Donald), designed to be ambiguous with regard to whether Donald is a high achiever. The description included high performance, goal-related behaviors that could be understood as evidence of an achieving nature or as due to situational pressures; for example studying all night could be interpreted as evidence of an achieving nature or as evidence that Donald had not studied much previously.

Participants were asked to rate Donald on six traits; half of these pertained to the degree to which Donald was a high achiever and the other three were achievement-irrelevant filler items. The behavioral measure consisted of three word-search puzzles. For the impression formation measures, goal primed participants rated Donald higher than did the neutral primed participants. Ratings of Donald were lower in the delay condition for the goal primed participants. The ratings did not differ across delay conditions for the neutral primed participants. In contrast, performance on the word-search task increased for goal primed participants after a delay. In the no-delay condition, perfor-mance was higher for goal primed participants than for neutral primed participants.

With the delay, performance was significantly enhanced for the goal primed partici-pants, while performance did not differ for the neutral primed participants. These results suggest that the perceptual effects of priming decayed over time, whereas the motivational effects increased over time.

Since brands are an integral feature of the environment and because they involve devel-oped associations, they too can activate goals. Fitzsimons et al. (2008) showed that brands with certain associations can activate goals related to those associations. They specifically examined the association of Apple Computers and creativity. Apple Computers has dili-gently worked to create associations for its brand that reflect creativity, innovation and ingenuity. The authors hypothesized that exposure to the Apple logo would activate the associated construct of creativity and would trigger the goal to be creative. As a result, participants would exhibit greater creativity in a subsequent task. The authors sublimi-nally primed participants with the Apple Computers logo, the IBM logo, or a neutral pattern. The IBM brand was used because a pretest confirmed that although it does not have an association with creativity, it is generally viewed positively.

Creativity was measured using an alternative uses task, a standard measure of creativ-ity (for example, Eisenberger et al., 1998; Glover and Gary, 1976). In this task, partici-pants were asked to list as many alternative uses as they could come up with for a brick (for example, as a hammer). Participants primed with the Apple logo came up with more uses for the brick than did either the control group or the IBM group. In addition, those uses were rated by a set of judges as more creative than either the control group or the IBM group. These measures did not differ across the control and IBM groups.

Importantly, participants did not express awareness of what was presented during the subliminal priming task or awareness that their behavior had been influenced.

To show that this process was goal priming and not trait or stereotype priming, the authors conducted another study that was identical in nature to the study just described but included a delay between the priming task and the brick uses measure. The authors found that the participants primed with the Apple logo showed greater creativity than did either the control or the IBM group in the no-delay condition, but importantly, this difference was enhanced in the delay condition. This suggests that more than just seman-tic activation occurred as the effect persisted beyond the delay period; in other words, a creativity goal was activated.

As further evidence of the ability of brands to prime goals, the authors conducted an additional study showing that the need to fulfill the goal dissipated after progress was made towards achieving that goal via another outlet. The authors primed participants with either the Disney Channel brand logo or the E! Channel brand logo. A pretest indicated that although the Disney and E! channels are rated equally positively, the Disney Channel is per-ceived as honest, while the E! Channel is perper-ceived as neutral in the honesty dimension. In this study, participants were supraliminally primed using a brand logo rating task.

Participants were asked to rate various fonts and colors of television channel logos, with the Disney or E! channel logos comprising 25 per cent of the logos rated. The other logos did not differ across conditions. Participants were given an opportunity to fulfill the honesty goal by responding to a goal progress question related to honesty. The control group was not asked a goal-progress question. The distinction between the low- and high-progress conditions was that the question in the low-progress condition referred to thinking about changes one could make to become more honest, whereas the question in the high-progress question referred to thinking about behaviors that actually show they are an honest person.

All participants then completed a social desirability measure as the measure of honesty.

Disney-primed participants scored higher in honesty than did the E!-primed participants in the low and control conditions. However, in the high-progress condition, the Disney-primed participants did not differ from the E!-Disney-primed participants. This suggests that in the high-progress condition, participants were given the opportunity to satisfy their honesty goal and hence did not need to exhibit honesty on the social desirability measure.

As a further example of a brand’s ability to activate goals, Chartrand et al. (forthcom-ing) used subliminal exposure to activate prestige or value goals using prestige- or value-oriented retail brands. The authors subliminally exposed participants to names of upscale (Tiffany, Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom) or value (Wal-Mart, Kmart and Dollar Store) retailers. Participants were then presented with two different options of socks and microwaves, of which one option was a prestige option and the other a value option. The socks were Nike socks sold for $5.25 a pair (prestige option) or Hanes socks sold for $6 for two pairs (value option). The microwave options were a Haier microwave for $69 (value option) or a Sharp microwave for $99 (prestige option). Participants were asked to indicate their relative preference for the two options on a 1–7 scale anchored by ‘strong preference for [the value option]’ and ‘strong preference for [the prestige option]’. For both products, participants expressed stronger relative preference for the value option when they had been primed with the valued-oriented brands than when primed with the pres-tige brands. Importantly, none of the participants made the connection linking the priming task to the choice task.