The Inhibiting Effect of Brand Salience on Brand Name Recall

This paper reports on a replication of Alba and Chattopadhyay’s (1986) study of the effects of substantially heightened brand salience upon the recall of competing brand names. Heightened salience was consistently shown to have an inhibiting effect on recall across a variety of experimental conditions. However, in the replication study this salience effect was not observed. Instead a trend in the reverse direction was found. This new finding is congruent with associative network model of memory and its prediction that subjects concentrating on a brand should trigger links in memory to the brand and other brands in the category. The Inhibiting Effect of Brand Salience on Brand Name Recall This paper reports on a replication of a study that has potentially vast impact on marketing especially in the area of advertising recall and brand choice. If consumer recall is inhibited by increasing salience of a brand then the effect of exposing consumers to a brand at the point of purchase should limit their choice set and eventually their choice. Salience has been defined as the “prominence or level of activation of a brand in memory” (Alba and Chattopadhyay 1986). To make a brand name fully salient is to give it top-of-mind awareness where it will be the first brand brought to mind by the consumers in a search of internal memory when cued to recall information. Theoretical and empirical work has suggested that this may be a primary role of repetitive image advertising and other marketing communications; to change salience rather than to effect attitude change (Ehrenberg, 1974; Miller and Berry 1998). This paper reports on a replication of a series of five experiments by Alba and Chattopadhyay (1986), which investigated the inhibiting effect of brand salience on brand name recall. Alba and Chattopadhyay (1986) showed a consistent significant inhibition effect with subjects in the heightened salience condition able to recall fewer brands than subjects in the low salience condition. This study replicated the experiments conducted by Alba and Chattopadhyay and produced contradictory results. Methodological design explains some of the differences in results and supports the finding of our study that heightened salience does not inhibit recall. Salience Differentials and Recall Heightened salience has been proposed to inhibit the recall of other brands in the consumer’s memory due to the process of sampling with replacement (Rundus 1973). The method of recalling information by sampling with replacement indicates that when a consumer recalls brand information from memory they recall a brand, which will then be replaced in their retrieval set available for further recall. It is proposed that a salient brand will be recalled first due to its prominence in the consumer’s mind and the salient brand will be recalled again at the expense of competing brands. The mere act of recall itself heightens a brand’s salience as it strengthens the links in memory to that brand and causes the brand to reach the threshold of retrieval more easily, according to the Anderson (1983) model of spreading activation in semantic memory. A salient brand would then continue to be recalled to the exclusion of other brands, including competitor’s brands in the consumer’s retrieval set. Does Using Brand Names as Cues Inhibit or Facilitate Recall? Nedungadi (1990) found using a brand as a cue facilitates brand retrieval through both a direct and indirect effect. Priming a minor brand in a minor category increased the probability of retrieval of the major brand in that minor category. This is tested in the first experiment by looking at the effect of pre-experimental salience using both high salience and low salience cues (as per Nedungadi 1990). Alba and Chattopadhyay (1986) found that the provision of a brand name prior to recall could facilitate brand recall if the brand name cues an unretrieved (sub) category, but inhibits brand recall in accessible categories. Alba and Chattopadhyay (1986) specifically investigated the impact of extremely heightened salience rather than merely the effect of being presented with a cue prior to recall and found the inhibition effect of high salience was observed consistently across a series of experiments designed to extend the generalisability of results. Purpose of the Research It is known that multiple cues at the point of retrieval inhibit recall of competitor’s brand names (Nickerson 1984; Roediger and Neely 1982), but this experiment investigates whether or not the provision of a single “salient” cue will have a similar effect to the presentation of multiple cues. H0: Substantially increasing the salience of a brand name cue at the point of retrieval will cause inhibition of competitors’ brand names in the recall process. H1: Substantially increasing the salience of a brand name cue at the point of retrieval will facilitate heightened recall of competitors’ brand names in the recall process.