Brand Management: Research, theory and practice

these stimuli enter the mind via the senses, and how they lead to action (choice). It
is also fundamental to understand the if–then logic that applies to this consumer
perspective.
Cognitive psychology is concerned with the higher cognitive processes,
namely memory, language, problem solving, imagery, deduction and induction.
In other words, the cognitive research tradition deals with aspects such as
reasoning, intelligence and learning, and tries to answer questions like ‘How do
we learn?’ ‘How do we remember?’ ‘What makes us pay attention?’ ‘What makes
us react?’ As we grow up, we develop greater cognitive structure; meaning that
we become still better at discriminating among stimuli and organizing stimuli
into meaningful constructs.
The cognitive research tradition deliberately neglects emotional factors as well
as historical and cultural aspects when studying how human beings function and
behave. Relevant to this approach is how we store knowledge, how we remember,
and how our attention is captured. The sum of this process is to understand how
this process leads to action, in our line of interest: brand choice.
We store enormous amounts of knowledge in our memory. Memory is activated
(by a sensory input) and spreading activities begin. Thereby, knowledge is
retrieved from memory. Knowledge in memory consists of nodes and links and is
structured into associative networks. Nodes are the stored information connected
by links in associative networks. The nodes vary in strength; some associations are
stronger than others. Environmental stimuli (e.g. a commercial message) trigger a
node that through the ‘spreading activity’ triggers new nodes associated with the
first one. An example of this spreading activity might be the word Volkswagen.
The retrieval of the node Volkswagen triggers a spreading activity that potentially
could look like figure 6.5. The associations can continue in all directions until they
have lost relevance for the node Volkswagen. The fact that some links are empha-
sized shows that some associations are more direct and are thus retrieved more
easily than others (they are strongerassociations).
A node is a mental representation. Cognitive research aims at deepening the
understanding of mental representations as a level of description, separable from,

Supporting theme:

The cognitive consumer

perspective

Supporting theme:

The infomation-processing

theory of consumer choice

Core theme:

Customer-based

brand equity

Figure 6.4Supporting themes and the core themes of the consumer-based approach

88 Seven brand approaches