Evaluative conditioning of liked and disliked brands
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1
University of Newcastle, Australia
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2
Webster Vienna Private University, Psychology, Austria
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3
Vienna University, Psychology, Austria
Can advertising change our attitudes towards our most liked and disliked brands? Marketing literature suggests that well established brand attitudes are resistant to the effects of advertising. In addition, learning experts, quoting conditioning literature, have suggested that changing attitudes towards well-established brands is extremely difficult. However, we know that our attitudes towards brands are entirely learned and can change without us ever coming into contact with the brand. These contradictory findings provide support for the notion that the tools currently employed to assess consumer attitudes are ineffective.
Assuming that this is the case, the current study employed an online survey to create individual brand lists. Subsequent sessions saw participants enter the lab and re-rate these visually presented brand names. Simultaneously, brain activity in response to the brands was collected via electroencephalography (EEG). After collecting participants’ implicit and explicit ratings towards each of the brands, they underwent conditioning where liked brands were conditioned negatively and disliked brands were conditioned positively using affective sounds. Although results obtained via self-report are in line with previous findings and suggest our conscious attitudes do not change, EEG proved to be adequately sensitive to detect the effects of conditioning. As a result of conditioning, disliked brands elicited a more positive going waveform than liked brands at parietal sites beginning at 1000ms and remaining until 1800ms. Similarly, activity at frontal sites was also seen to be larger for disliked brands than liked brands. These effects began at 400ms and remained until 800ms.
In summary, our study demonstrates that objective methods such as the EEG are able to get access to levels of neural processing that highlight significant evaluative conditioning effects. While those processing levels do not influence any conscious attitude aspects, it may well be that other influences occur, which have to be investigated in future studies.
Keywords:
attitudes,
brands,
late positive potential,
Implicit,
explicit,
Marketing,
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Conference:
ASP2015 - 25th Annual Conference of the Australasian Society for Psychophysiology, Sydney, Australia, 2 Dec - 4 Dec, 2015.
Presentation Type:
Oral Presentation
Topic:
Psychophysiology
Citation:
Bosshard
SS and
Walla
P
(2015). Evaluative conditioning of liked and disliked brands.
Conference Abstract:
ASP2015 - 25th Annual Conference of the Australasian Society for Psychophysiology.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2015.219.00018
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Received:
25 Sep 2015;
Published Online:
30 Nov 2015.
*
Correspondence:
Prof. Peter Walla, University of Newcastle, Newcastle, Australia, peter.walla@webster.ac.at