Evaluative conditioning of liked and disliked brands

Abstract

Event Abstract Back to Event Evaluative conditioning of liked and disliked brands Shannon S. Bosshard1 and Peter Walla1, 2, 3* 1 University of Newcastle, Australia 2 Webster Vienna Private University, Psychology, Austria 3 Vienna University, Psychology, Austria Can advertising change our attitudes towards our most liked and disliked brands? Marketing literature suggests that well established brand attitudes are resistant to the effects of advertising. In addition, learning experts, quoting conditioning literature, have suggested that changing attitudes towards well-established brands is extremely difficult. However, we know that our attitudes towards brands are entirely learned and can change without us ever coming into contact with the brand. These contradictory findings provide support for the notion that the tools currently employed to assess consumer attitudes are ineffective. Assuming that this is the case, the current study employed an online survey to create individual brand lists. Subsequent sessions saw participants enter the lab and re-rate these visually presented brand names. Simultaneously, brain activity in response to the brands was collected via electroencephalography (EEG). After collecting participants’ implicit and explicit ratings towards each of the brands, they underwent conditioning where liked brands were conditioned negatively and disliked brands were conditioned positively using affective sounds. Although results obtained via self-report are in line with previous findings and suggest our conscious attitudes do not change, EEG proved to be adequately sensitive to detect the effects of conditioning. As a result of conditioning, disliked brands elicited a more positive going waveform than liked brands at parietal sites beginning at 1000ms and remaining until 1800ms. Similarly, activity at frontal sites was also seen to be larger for disliked brands than liked brands. These effects began at 400ms and remained until 800ms. In summary, our study demonstrates that objective methods such as the EEG are able to get access to levels of neural processing that highlight significant evaluative conditioning effects. While those processing levels do not influence any conscious attitude aspects, it may well be that other influences occur, which have to be investigated in future studies. Keywords: attitudes, brands, late positive potential, Implicit, explicit, Marketing, Advertisement Conference: ASP2015 - 25th Annual Conference of the Australasian Society for Psychophysiology, Sydney, Australia, 2 Dec - 4 Dec, 2015. Presentation Type: Oral Presentation Topic: Psychophysiology Citation: Bosshard SS and Walla P (2015). Evaluative conditioning of liked and disliked brands. Conference Abstract: ASP2015 - 25th Annual Conference of the Australasian Society for Psychophysiology. doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2015.219.00018 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 25 Sep 2015; Published Online: 30 Nov 2015. * Correspondence: Prof. Peter Walla, University of Newcastle, Newcastle, Australia, peter.walla@webster.ac.at Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Shannon S Bosshard Peter Walla Google Shannon S Bosshard Peter Walla Google Scholar Shannon S Bosshard Peter Walla PubMed Shannon S Bosshard Peter Walla Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.