The Divergence of Implicit and Explicit Consumer Evaluations

Abstract

This research extends findings that implicit and explicit attitudes may diverge to a consumer evaluation task using multiple measures of implicit evaluation: Evaluative Movement Assessment (EMA; Brendl, Markman, & Messner, 2005) and Evaluative Priming (Fazio, Jackson, Dunton, & Williams,1995). These measures were significantly associated with each other for both positive and negative implicit attitudes. Neither measure predicted explicit liking of the product or explicit intention to purchase the product. We believe this to be the first such demonstrated divergence in a naturalistic, unconditioned consumer evaluation context. Implicit activation of the product’s emotional benefit (e.g., “relaxation”), as assessed in a lexical decision task (LDT), was not associated with the EMA or evaluative priming, but was significantly associated with both explicit emotional state (e.g., relaxation) and explicit purchase intention; the latter effect was not mediated by explicit emotion.