Environmental Cues 1 DOGS ON THE STREET, PUMAS ON YOUR FEET: HOW CUES IN THE ENVIRONMENT INFLUENCE PRODUCT EVALUATION AND CHOICE

Little empirical research has examined the implicit effects of environmental cues on consumer behavior. Across six studies using a combination of field and laboratory methods, the authors find that products are more accessible, evaluated more favorably, and chosen more frequently when the surrounding environment contains more perceptuallyor conceptuallyrelated cues. The findings highlight the impact of frequent – in addition to recent –priming in shaping product evaluation and choice: More frequent exposure to perceptuallyor conceptuallyrelated cues increases product accessibility and makes the product easier to process. This increased accessibility, in turn, influences product evaluation and choice, which are found to vary directly with the frequency of exposure to conceptually-related cues. These results support the hypothesis that conceptual priming effects can have strong impact on real-world consumer judgments. Environmental Cues 4 On July 4, 1997, NASA landed the Pathfinder spacecraft on the surface of Mars. This “Mission to Mars” captured media attention worldwide over the course of the following months and during this period, candy bar maker Mars Inc. also noticed a rather unusual increase in sales (White 1997). Though the Mars Bar takes its name from the company founder and not from the Earth’s neighboring planet, consumers apparently responded to news about the planet Mars by purchasing more Mars bars. This was a lucky turn of events for the candy bar company, to be sure, but what does it mean for our understanding of consumer choice? In this article, we examine how repeated incidental exposure to features of the everyday environment can influence product evaluation and choice. Building on recent processing fluency research (Lee and Labroo 2004; Whittlesea 1993), as well as classic work on spreading activation (Collins and Loftus 1975), we hypothesize that exposure to environmental cues will repeatedly “prime” perceptuallyor conceptually-related product representations in memory. The resulting ease of processing the product representation, in turn, can cause increases in product evaluation, purchase likelihood, and choice (Lee and Labroo 2004; Nedungadi 1990). Using a combination of laboratory and field methods, we investigate several hypotheses that further understanding of priming effects in the everyday consumer environment and the processes underlying such effects. First, we examine whether consumers whose environments contain more perceptuallyor conceptually-related cues evaluate products more positively and choose them more often. Second, we examine the role of frequency of cue exposure in priming, hypothesizing that increased exposure frequency leads to increases in evaluations of related products. By doing so, we highlight the underlying role of fluency in producing these effects, extending past research by demonstrating that an accumulation of past exposures to related cues can increase product accessibility and evaluation in the same fashion as recent exposure. Environmental Cues 5 We also pursue several smaller objectives, aimed to contribute to the understanding of priming effects in consumer environments. We examine whether such effects can arise via newly constructed links between previously unrelated constructs (in addition to well-learned semantic links), whether they occur for familiar brands (or only unfamiliar brands), and whether they can occur outside conscious awareness. Six studies examine these hypotheses and related objectives. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND Once concepts are activated via direct exposure, they are known to impact judgment and decision-making. For example, recently primed brands are more likely to be included in and chosen from a consumer’s consideration set (e.g., Nedungadi 1990; Shapiro 1999). Similarly, repeated exposure to an object can produce more favorable ratings of that object (Zajonc 1968), and such “mere exposure” effects have been shown to occur for everything from the attractiveness of people (Moreland and Beach, 1992) to brands (Baker, 1999; Janiszewski 1993). Thus, it has been well established that people prefer objects they have previously encountered, but can similar effects emerge for objects related to those that were previously encountered? Psychological research has demonstrated that situational cues or primes can automatically activate associated representations in memory, leading them to become more accessible (e.g., Higgins, Rholes, and Jones 1977) and to automatically spread to related constructs via an associative network (Anderson 1983; Collins and Loftus 1975; Neely 1977). According to this spreading activation account, priming (or activating) a given construct in memory leads to the spontaneous activation of related constructs in memory. Thus priming a given construct can have downstream effects on perceptually or conceptually-related objects. Environmental Cues 6 Indeed, though most studies have focused on direct exposure, research also suggests that product choice and evaluations can be influenced by exposure to perceptually or conceptuallyrelated stimuli (Gordon and Holyoak 1983; Whittlesea 1993). Participants repeatedly exposed to random polygons, for example, showed increased favorability toward previously unseen polygons that were perceptually similar (Monahan, Murphy, and Zajonc 2000). Exposure to a given stimulus can also increase the choice and evaluation of conceptually-related targets (e.g., those with semantic or conceptual links to the primed stimulus, Lee and Labroo 2004; Whittlesea 1993). Nedungadi (1990) found that brand choice is affected not only by prior exposure to that specific brand, but also to competing brands. He theorized that activation of a brand spreads to related brands, causing them to be more accessible, which leads to increased likelihood of their inclusion in the consideration set. Predictive contexts can also lead people to evaluate items more positively: Participants rated a bottle of ketchup more favorably after viewing a pictorial story about a fast-food restaurant, as opposed to a supermarket, presumably because ketchup is more closely linked to fast-food restaurants (Lee and Labroo 2004). Because ease of processing is often positively valenced (Harmon-Jones and Allen 2001), the authors suggest these findings were driven by increases in conceptual fluency (ease of processing) that arose from exposure to the predictive context. Importantly, according to the discrepancy-attribution hypothesis, such processing ease will only positively influence judgment when the fluency is unexpected (Whittlesea and Williams 1998; 2001a; 2001b). When people are aware of the reason for processing ease, there is no discrepancy between how much fluency they feel and how much they expect to feel (because they can easily attribute the ease of processing to the source) and thus no reason to attribute the Environmental Cues 7 fluency to positive qualities of the target. If, however, there is a discrepancy between expected and experienced fluency, people are likely to attribute it to positive qualities of the target. An interesting implication of this hypothesis is that obvious direct exposure to an object may not always positively impact judgment, because people may attribute their fluency experience to the fact that they have just observed the object. In contrast, indirect exposure or conceptual priming – when people are exposed to an object that is cognitively linked with the target – may be especially likely to produce positive judgments, because people are unlikely to make an attribution of the fluency to exposure to a seemingly irrelevant object. In this situation, people are not expecting to experience fluency, and thus will be less likely to correct for it. Downstream Priming Effects in the Everyday Environment The above-mentioned research presents a case for the importance of cue exposure in constructing evaluations and making choices, but there have been relatively few examinations of such effects in real-world contexts. In everyday life – as opposed to in the carefully controlled laboratory – consumers are inundated with a seemingly infinite number of cues (Peter and Olson 2005); how much influence can any one cue really have? Indeed, Bargh (2006) recently noted that one of the major remaining issues in the basic priming literature is how these effects play out in real-world environments, which are infinitely more complex than those in the lab. Simonson (2005) has suggested that until researchers can show that these automatic priming effects produce real-world change, the impact and importance of these laboratory findings is undetermined. The current manuscript contributes to growing efforts to understand how priming Environmental Cues 8 effects shape everyday judgment and decision-making (Berger and Heath, 2005; Berger, Meredith, and Wheeler 2006; Kay et al. 2004). Further, we know that direct product exposure (e.g., advertising or aisle displays) positively impact sales (e.g., Baker 1999; Bemmaor and Mouchoux 1991), but what about exposure to perceptually or conceptually linked stimuli? The more consumers see advertisements for Puma brand sneakers, the more they should like and purchase Puma sneakers, but what about exposure to stimuli related to Puma? Might it be the case that the more consumers see dogs, the more they will like and purchase Puma sneakers?