Blissful Insularity: When Brands are Judged in Isolation from Competitors

Abstract

The need to evaluate a single brand in isolation, without explicit comparisons to competitors, is ubiquitous in consumer judgment because competitors are often not readily apparent. Although consumers routinely make such judgments, in this paper we show that when a brand is judged in isolation, the judgment is often overly favorable. Moreover, we explore when and why this tendency occurs. Data from 259 participants across 3 experiments that considered very different product categories, and that were conducted with student and adult consumer samples, converge to show that; (1) isolated brand evaluations on average are characterized by a favorableness bias, (2) this bias results from consumers' selective processing of information about the focal brand, (3) favorableness bias is attenuated if context leads consumers to consider alternatives to a salient focal brand, and (4) the isolated brand judgments of experts are much better calibrated than are those of novices.