HIGH ELABORATION LIKELIHOOD, BEHAVIOURAL ATTITUDE FORMATION 99Marketing actions are often designed to change people’s attitudes towards certain brands or products. Marketers
do this on the assumption that inducing a positive attitude towards a brand will result in attitude-consistent buying
behaviour. Hence, by changing attitudes, they actually want to sway choices in the direction of their products. This
is a reasonable approach since attitudes are often easier to change than actual behaviour. However, a lot of social,
psychological and consumer research has already shown that the link between attitudes and behaviour is not that
straightforward, and that behaviour is often not in line with reported attitudes.
A study investigated to what extent consumers’ choice depends on their attitudes or on the accessibility of a
certain brand in the decision environment. The research was set up around two data collections, separated from
each other by one week. In the first phase, 346 respondents’ attitudes towards different charities were measured.
In the second phase the researchers manipulated the accessibility of the charities by getting respondents to answer
questions about either their most preferred choice or their fourth most preferred choice (254 students fully com-
pleted both questionnaires).
Subsequently, participants were asked to decide on a charitable organisation to receive a donation of €250.
Next, they were asked about the perceived importance of the decision they had to make. Participants were split into
two groups to create a high- and a low-involvement group, based on the median of the perceived importance of the
decision.
The results show that simply making a choice option relatively more accessible or salient in the decision context
compared with its competitors increases the likelihood that the alternative becomes part of the consideration set
for both low- and high-involvement respondents. For low-involvement individuals, also the choice for the alternative
that was made more accessible increased. High-involvement respondents were more likely to choose their most
preferred charity, irrespective of whether another charity was made more accessible.
This study once again underscores the importance of creating positive attitudes in high-involvement respond-
ents or for high-involvement products. On the other hand, for low-involvement individuals and low-involvement
situations, high brand accessibility by means of repeated ad exposure or being salient in the purchase environment
(e.g. by means of floorboards, shelf presence, etc.) may be sufficient.^99researCh insight
The impact of brand attitudes versus brand accessibility on brand choiceHigh elaboration likelihood, behavioural attitude formation
The theories discussed above have often been tested for hypothetical products and/or hypo-
thetical brands, which makes them more relevant for new than for established brands.
Although using hypothetical stimuli is ideal for eliminating research biasing effects such as
brand knowledge, the extent to which the brand has been advertised in the past and the influ-
ence of previous campaigns, it disregards a source of information that might have important
consequences for the way a consumer processes and evaluates a new marketing message,
more specifically personal brand experience through previous brand usage. Post-experience
models assume central-route processing of prior brand experiences. So, in this case the con-
sumers are motivated, willing and able to think of previous brand experience and will take
this into account in forming an attitude towards the brand, as well as in deciding what brand
to buy in the future.
Although incorporating the influence of brand experience is a much more realistic
approach to consumer information processing, brand experience has been neglected by most
researchers. As a consequence, only a few communications models exist that try to explain its
effect on the communications process. However, it is straightforward that brand satisfactionM03_PELS3221_05_SE_C03.indd 99 6/5/13 3:03 PM