When the Irrelevant Becomes Relevant: The Similarity-to-Old Effect on Brand Categorization

Abstract

Two experiments investigated the influence of advertising on analytic (rule-based) and nonanalytic (similarity-based) brand categorization. Subjects were exposed to advertisements that contained attribute information of a set of brands. They also learned to classify the brands into different categories by using a simple, perfectly predictive classification rule. On a subsequent transfer test, the accuracy of classifying a set of new brands was affected by the classification rule and the overall similarity of both rule-relevant and irrelevant attributes between new and old brands. Results also indicated that the use of classification rule and overall similarity in brand categorization varied as a function of advertising encoding strategies and availability of cognitive resources. The process dissociation procedure was used to offer quantitative estimates of the relative contribution of classification rule and brand similarity to categorization decisions. The estimates showed that the influence of brand similarity was insensitive to subjects' intention or control.