Sekar Raju

The Moderating Effect of Brand Commitment on the Evaluation of Competitive Brands

In this research, we examine whether brand commitment has a negative effect on competitor brands. We find that committed consumers systematically underrate competitive brands. We find that the process by which this negative evaluation of the competitor brand occurs depends on the extent to which counterarguments are generated about the competitor brand message. Therefore, by using argument strength (Study 1), the number of arguments (Study 2), and a combination of both of these factors (Study 3), we propose and test two advertising techniques that may help the competitor brand overcome these negative evaluations.

The Effect of Brand Commitment on the Evaluation of Nonpreferred Brands: A Disconfirmation Process

This research finds that high- and low-commitment consumers use different information-processing strategies when exposed to competitive brand information. High-commitment consumers use a disconfirmatory processing strategy, focusing on the dissimilarities between their preferred brand and the competitor brand. Low-commitment consumers focus on the similarities between the advertised brand and their preferred brand. These processing differences lead to differences in the evaluation of a competitive brand between high- and low-commitment consumers. However, priming high-commitment consumers to focus on the similarities and low-commitment consumers on the dissimilarities between their preferred brand and a competitor brand mitigates the effects of the different processing strategies. (c) 2008 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..