34.3 Interpersonal perception and consumer lay beliefs
Info valence: Negativity bias for products (negative info about a product has greater influence on brand perceptions than positive info). (Herr, Kardes, and Kim 1991)
Positivity bias for services (positive experience from a service provider can lead customers to infer positivity about the brand as a whole than negative experience).
Could be because service is more heterogeneous.
this effect is greater for novice consumer.
Study 1: First time car insurance buyers
- Alternative explanation: Subtyping (R. Weber and Crocker 1983), or occupational stereotype consistency, question order are all ruled out.
Study 2: replicate study 1: compare the effect of info about individual service provider to that of others who is not from the firm.
- Subjects perceive focal firm employee more positively and consider negative experience from the other firms’ agents as outliers.
Because consumers are predisposed to think that a service encounter in general should be more positive than negative (Fornell 2005), this assumption could explain why consumers consider positive experience as typical and generalize it to the brand, and negative experience as outliers.
3 sources that affect consumers’ beliefs:
general perceptions of services
beliefs specific to a firm
beliefs specific to an occupation
Study 3 used a critical incident method to examine the following hypothesis: the positive effect is moderated by consumer experience (e.g., stronger for less experience consumers).
- Valence affects perceived typicality , but experience with a firm did not influence typicality (cant find support for H3)
Study 4: Replicate study 1 and 2 in a natural setting
Men are less likely to buy environmentally friendly products than women because the close association between green behavior and femininity (perceived by both men and women, and both users and observers).
Prior research attribute this gap to personality traits (women are more prosocial altruistic (J. A. Lee and Holden 1999), and stronger ethic of care (Zelezny, Chua, and Aldrich 2000))
The link between greenness and femininity could be explained by
target of green marketing usually involved women (e.g., cleaning, laundry).
caring and nurturing from greenness are feminine traits
Since men are more concerned with gender -identity maintenance (which is kinda surprising from my view), they avoid purchasing green products which might jeopardize their macho image.
- From social-identity theory: self-concept is also derived from perceived group membership (Turner and Oakes 1986)
Smile affects 2 social judgments: warmth and competence
Broader smile leads to more warmth, but less competent
Consumers focus moderates this effect
Promotion-focused consumers (and low-risk consumption) like bigger smile on warmth
Prevention-focused consumers (and high-risk consumption) like slight smile (signal competent)
Based on stereotype content model (SCM) of social judgments (Fiske et al. 2002)
Facial configuration has evolutionary proposes.
(Haws, Reczek, and Sample 2017)
Consumers believe healthier foods are more expensive than less healthy foods.
Due to the dual process model, intuitions based on biased information (processed heuristically) will lead consumers evaluating healthy claims with higher standard (e.g., higher standard for intuition-inconsistent than consistent claim).
Lay theories or lay beliefs about food = expensive intuition affects consumer decision making process, because this process is low involvement one.