What's in a Brand Concept? From Networks of Brand Associations to Situated Brand Concepts

摘要

Recent work in psychology on representation of concepts in human memory has proposed that consumers do not store concepts as lists of connected attributes, benefits, and attitudes (i.e., brand associations); rather, concepts are grounded in situations that include participants, their introspections, events, location, and time, among others. Drawing on this research, we elicit consumers' brand knowledge using (i) a word association technique which asks participants to describe everything that comes to their minds when thinking about a brand and (ii) a situation technique, which asks participants to visualize a typical scene for a brand and describe it in detail. We investigate the differences in brand knowledge retrieved by the two techniques for functional and symbolic brands (i.e., product-related knowledge vs. situational information such as participants, including users, their characteristics, actions, evaluations, events, time, etc.). We then inspect which of the different elements of brand knowledge are better predictors of consumers' self-brand connections ("hot affect") and brand attitude ("cold affect").