Tom Meyvis

Effects of Brand Logo Complexity, Repetition, and Spacing on Processing Fluency and Judgment

It is generally accepted that repeated exposure to an advertisement can influence liking for an advertisement and for the brand names and product packages included in the advertisement. Although it has often been assumed that repeated exposure leads to a direct affective response, more recent evidence suggests that prior exposure leads to processing fluency at the time of judgment. It is a misattribution about the source of this processing fluency that results in preference for the stimulus. To date, the majority of research on the processing fluency/attribution hypothesis has focused on when people will make fluency-based attributions, while assuming the amount of the processing fluency is a direct function of exposure. In this article, we propose that stimulus characteristics and presentation factors will interact with repetition to determine the amount of processing fluency associated with a stimulus at various levels of exposure. Four studies are used to test whether two-factor theory or dual-process theory provides a better account of the source of the processing fluency. Implications for logo design are discussed. Copyright 2001 by the University of Chicago.

When Are Broader Brands Stronger Brands? An Accessibility Perspective on the Success of Brand Extensions

It is common for brands to extend into additional product categories. The most successful extensions involve brands that are associated with benefits that are valued in the extension category. We propose that brand extension success also depends on the accessibility of these benefit associations and that accessibility, in turn, depends on the amount of interference by competing brand associations (e.g., category associations). One implication of this proposition is that broad brands (i.e., brands offering a portfolio of diverse products) will tend to have more accessible benefit associations than narrow brands (i.e., brands offering a portfolio of similar products) and can therefore engage in more successful brand extensions than narrow brands, even when the narrow brands are more similar to the extension category. However, when benefit associations are equally accessible and diagnostic, the evaluation of brand extensions will instead be dictated by the similarity between brand and extension category associations.

Interrupted Consumption: Disrupting Adaptation to Hedonic Experiences

Six studies demonstrate that interrupting a consumption experience can make pleasant experiences more enjoyable and unpleasant experiences more irritating, even though consumers avoid breaks in pleasant experiences and choose breaks in unpleasant experiences. Across a variety of hedonic experiences (e.g., listening to noises or songs, sitting in a massage chair), the authors observe that breaks disrupt hedonic adaptation and, as a result, intensify the subsequent experience.

Avoiding Future Regret in Purchase-Timing Decisions

When deciding when to make a purchase, people often compare their outcomes to those that would have occurred had they purchased earlier or later. In this article, we examine how pre- and postpurchase comparisons affect regret and satisfaction, and whether consumers learn to avoid decisions that result in regret. In the first two experiments, we show that information learned after the purchase has a greater impact on satisfaction than information learned before the purchase. In addition, negative price comparisons have a greater impact on satisfaction than positive comparisons. These results imply that if consumers who receive postpurchase information wish to avoid future feelings of regret, they should defer their purchases longer. Our second two experiments demonstrate this phenomenon: Subjects who were exposed to postchoice information set higher decision thresholds, consistent with the minimization of future regret. Paradoxically, providing subjects with additional postchoice information resulted in decreased average earnings, suggesting that consumers may try to avoid future regret even when doing so conflicts with expected value maximization.

You’re Having Fun When Time Flies The Hedonic Consequences of Subjective Time Progression

Seven studies tested the hypothesis that people use subjective time progression in hedonic evaluation. When people believe that time has passed unexpectedly quickly, they rate tasks as more engaging, noises as less irritating, and songs as more enjoyable. We propose that felt time distortion operates as a metacognitive cue that people implicitly attribute to their enjoyment of an experience (i.e., time flew, so the experience must have been fun). Consistent with this attribution account, the effects of felt time distortion on enjoyment ratings were moderated by the need for attribution, the strength of the “time flies” naive theory, and the presence of an alternative attribution. These findings suggest a previously unexplored process through which subjective time progression can influence the hedonic evaluation of experiences.

Why Don't We Learn to Accurately Forecast Feelings? How Misremembering Our Predictions Blinds Us to Past Forecasting Errors

Why do affective forecasting errors persist in the face of repeated disconfirming evidence? Five studies demonstrate that people misremember their forecasts as consistent with their experience and thus fail to perceive the extent of their forecasting error. As a result, people do not learn from past forecasting errors and fail to adjust subsequent forecasts. In the context of a Super Bowl loss (Study 1), a presidential election (Studies 2 and 3), an important purchase (Study 4), and the consumption of candies (Study 5), individuals mispredicted their affective reactions to these experiences and subsequently misremembered their predictions as more accurate than they actually had been. The findings indicate that this recall error results from peoples tendency to anchor on their current affective state when trying to recall their affective forecasts. Further, those who showed larger recall errors were less likely to learn to adjust their subsequent forecasts and reminding people of their actual forecasts enhanced learning. These results suggest that a failure to accurately recall ones past predictions contributes to the perpetuation of forecasting errors.

Seeking Lasting Enjoyment with Limited Money: Financial Constraints Increase Preference for Material Goods over Experiences

Consumers with limited discretionary money face important trade-offs when deciding how to spend it. In the current research, we suggest that feelings of financial constraint increase consumers’ concern about the lasting utility of their purchases, which in turn increases their preference for material goods over experiences. The results of seven studies confirm that the consideration of financial constraints shifts consumers’ preferences toward material goods (rather than experiences), and that this systematic shift is due to an increased concern about the longevity of the purchase. This preference shift persists even when the material goods are more frivolous than the experiences, indicating that the effect is not driven by an increased desire for sensible and justifiable purchases. However, the shift toward material purchases disappears when the material good is unusually short lived, further implicating concern about longevity as the key driver of the effect. Finally, the consideration of financial constraints increases preference for material purchases even when the potential memories that experiences can provide are made explicitly salient. Together, these results indicate that financially constrained consumers spend their discretionary money on material purchases as a means of securing long-term consumption utility.

The Pain Was Greater If It Will Happen Again: The Effect of Anticipated Continuation on Retrospective Discomfort

Across 7 laboratory studies and 1 field study, we demonstrated that people remembered an unpleasant experience as more aversive when they expected this experience to return than when they had no such expectation. Our results indicate that this effect results from peoples tendency to brace for unpleasant experiences. Specifically, when faced with the anticipated return of the experience, people prepare for the worst, leading them to remember the initial experience as more aversive. This bracing can be reduced either by limiting peoples self-regulatory resources or by denying them the time to brace. These results indicate that peoples tendency to remember aversive experiences as less unpleasant than they actually were (as demonstrated in prior research) does not necessarily imply that people are willing to re-engage in these experiences-because the anticipation of repeating the experience may counteract the initial memory bias.

You Could Have Just Asked: Reply to Francis (2012)

In an earlier article (Galak & Meyvis, 2011), we reported eight studies that demonstrate people’s tendency to remember unpleasant experiences as more aversive when they think they will experience them again. Based on a test that, ironically, suffers from publication bias, Francis (2012) estimated that there is a high probability that we obtained at least one unsuccessful study that was left in the file drawer. He then argues that, because of this, our findings should be discounted. We propose that, instead of engaging in a statistical fishing expedition, Francis should have simply asked us for our file drawer. If he had done so, he would have quickly realized that a meta-analysis of all our studies (both published and unpublished) shows that the effect we reported is highly reliable. We suggest that when the answer is out there, it makes more sense to ask for it than to estimate it.

Learning from Mixed Feedback: Anticipation of the Future Reduces Appreciation of the Present

Consumers can evaluate their past choices by comparing their obtained outcome to other possible outcomes. We demonstrate that how people process this comparative feedback depends on whether they use it to prepare for future decisions. In particular, the anticipation of similar future choices increases consumers’ sensitivity to comparisons with better alternatives and reduces their liking of the chosen option. Our findings indicate that forward-looking consumers selectively test the hypothesis that their current choice can be improved on and, as a result, disproportionately attend to the unfavorable comparisons and fail to appreciate the value of their current choice.