Broadening Perceptions of Familiar Brands
Robert Jewell, Kent State University, United States
Christina Saenger, Kent State University, United States
P.O. Box 5190
Kent State University
Kent, Ohio 44242-0001
Extended Abstract
When changes in the market reveal the need for a well-defined brand to broaden
its consumer perceptions, such attempts are often met with resistance. Perceptions of
well-defined brands are typically strongly held, inhibiting the ability of a brand to
broaden perceptions when faced with changes in the market, such as shifts in consumer
preferences or flat revenues. This research examines how a well-defined brand can
encourage the assimilation of discrepant information into the brand meaning via
comparative advertising. We propose that the comparison brand acts as a referent,
facilitating the development of associations between the advertised brand and new
attribute information. Further, we argue that the characteristics associated with the
comparison brand will moderate the ability of a brand to expand its meaning via
comparative advertising.
It is generally accepted that brands are stored as concept nodes and are defined
based on linkages to category-relevant attributes (Nedungadi 1990). To broaden
perceptions of a brand, links to new attributes must be established. One way to establish
these links is to make salient relevant context cues (Meyers-Levy and Tybout 1997);
when context cues become accessible, the evaluation of an item is not only derived from
the characteristics of the item, but also from the interaction of the characteristics of the
item and the context in which the item is evaluated (Meyer and Johnson 1995). Thus,
employing a context cue or referent should facilitate consumers’ interpretation of the
extent to which a brand is associated with new attributes; however, a brand-attribute link
will be rejected for a brand attempting to associate with a product-class category that is
inconsistent with existing brand linkages. Well-defined brands are constrained by strong
associations to existing product-type attributes; the association of new information is
likely to be resisted due to the high level of discrepancy between the new information and
the existing associations. Combining new information with a contextual cue that
dissociates the brand from, but still ties to membership in, its existing product type,
should result in relative acceptance of the new attribute information.
Comparative advertising is often used in marketing to make a context cue salient.
The comparison brand serves as a reference point by which the new claim of the
advertised brand is, in part, judged. When selecting a comparison brand, a competitor
may be chosen from either the brand’s current product-type category, or from the
product-type category of the new attribute information. When comparing a brand to a
competitor in its existing product class category, the advertisement communicates points
of distinction of the brand from that competitive group (i.e., a dissociative strategy).
When comparing a brand to a competitor in the product-type category of the new
attribute information, points of similarity between the brands are emphasized (i.e., an
associative strategy).
When communicating the link between a brand and a new attribute from a
different product-type category with a noncomparative advertisement, we expect the
highly discrepant attribute information to be rejected due to its inconsistency with current
perceptions of the brand (cf. Meyers-Levy and Sternthal 1993); the development of the
link would be met with resistance. In a dissociative comparative advertisement, however,
we expect that the reference point increases the likelihood that the link will be developed
between the brand and the new attribute information because the comparison brand has
links to the current product-type category, providing a schema-consistent reference point
that makes the link between the advertised brand and new attribute seem less discrepant.
In an associative comparative advertisement, this tempering of the new claim is not
expected. The associative reference point should amplify the discrepancy between the
advertised brand and the new attribute information because the advertised brand would be
compared to two referents from a different product-type category: both the attribute and
the competitor from the new product-type category.
We hypothesized that a dissociative comparative advertising strategy would be
more effective in broadening perceptions of a well-defined brand than both an associative
strategy and a noncomparative strategy, and that there would be no difference between
the associative and noncomparative strategies. Further, we hypothesized that an
associative strategy would result in evaluations that are more consistent with the current
product-type category than would a dissociative or noncomparative strategy. Results of
our first study confirmed that the use of a reference point facilitates the broadening of the
meaning of a brand, and that the nature of the reference point (dissociative or associative)
matters. Further, results of the associative strategy showed that associative comparative
advertising strengthens the association to the existing product-type category.
While the dissociative comparative advertising strategy proved successful in our
first study, it may have a significant weakness. Repeated encoding of dissociative
information may strengthen the linkages of the advertised brand to the existing producttype category due to repeated activation of the schema-consistent reference point as the
comparison brand. Thus, we proposed that a comparative advertising approach
combining both dissociative and associative strategies will be successful, over time, in
pushing the brand away from the existing product-type category and pulling the brand
toward the new product-type category. We hypothesized that this combination approach
would be more effective than a purely-dissociative approach, and that the dissociative
approach would be perceived as more consistent with current product-type category
attributes than the combination strategy. Results confirmed that context cues from
multiple product-type categories were more effective in broadening perceptions, and that
multiple exposures to context cues from the current product-type category reinforce the
existing meaning of a brand.
The present paper contributes to the comparative advertising literature by
demonstrating how comparative advertising can be used to broaden perceptions of a welldefined, existing brand. Previous research on comparative advertising has focused on the
effects of a comparison brand on perceptions of new or unfamiliar brands, where the
process of assimilation is fairly straightforward. This paper examines the impact of
existing linkages on the acceptance of new information and provides a framework
through which a well-defined brand may broaden the way it is defined in the
marketplace.
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