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This study contends that consumer ethnocentrism and animosity rest on semantic and episodic memory, respectively. It further examines how the influence of consumer ethnocentrism and animosity on consumer boycott behaviour may vary over time and use the memory theory to explain these temporal differences.

Part 1 involved an experiment to demonstrate the relationship between consumer ethnocentrism/animosity and semantic/episodic memory. To determine the temporal characteristics of consumer ethnocentrism and animosity, Part 2 involved two quantitative surveys (one each in China and Japan), followed by another two surveys six months later.

Part 1 showed that consumer ethnocentrism and animosity were underpinned by semantic and episodic memory, respectively. Consistent with memory theory, Part 2 found that consumer ethnocentrism was temporally more stable than animosity. Consumer animosity influenced boycott behaviour during but not after the dispute, whereas consumer ethnocentrism influenced boycott behaviour during as well as the dispute. Finally, consumer ethnocentrism was antecedent to consumer animosity, siding with the relationship between semantic and episodic memory.

Limited to two countries, both with collectivistic culture. A longitudinal approach over multiple phases would further enhance the robustness of the findings.

Understanding the psychological underpinning of consumer ethnocentrism and animosity would allow firms to develop effective marketing strategies to appeal to consumers’ ethnocentric and animosity dispositions.

The first study to examine the psychological underpinnings of consumer ethnocentrism and animosity by drawing on the memory theory.

The purpose of this study is to clarify the role of various levels of modality richness [text-visual, audiovisual and augmented reality interactive technology (ARIT)] on vivid memories (visual sensory detailed, emotionally intense, first-person perspective and coherent) and exploratory behavior. To clarify which modality richness online retailers use is more appropriate to create a virtual reality simulation experience to fill a significant gap in the sensory interactive marketing paradigm.

A task-based laboratory study was conducted to provide users with private try-on space. A total of 429 valid questionnaires were collected, and partial least squares path modeling was adopted to test hypotheses.

The results indicate that various levels of modality richness (text-visual, audiovisual and ARIT) positively affect vivid memories (visual sensory detailed, emotionally intense, first-person perspective and coherent), and vivid memories successfully induce exploratory behavior.

The study results could also help retailers and brands with clear guidance in designing and creating simulation experience services and choosing the best way to present products. With the results of this research, retailers will also be able to grasp better the critical points of introducing innovative technology into the service experience and then create the benefits of digital economic growth.

Exploring which digital interactive technology online retailers use is more appropriate to create a virtual reality shopping experience to fill a significant gap in the sensory interactive marketing paradigm. Exploring the antecedents of vivid memories in a digital sensory interactive experience contributes to the body schema literature and the script theory. We draw from construal level theory (CLT) to clarify the impact of various levels of modality richness on driving the difference in sensory simulation schema to break through the limited findings of previous studies, namely using CLT to interpret psychological distance.

Extant research has largely treated country image (CI) as an exogenous variable, focusing mostly on its consequences for consumers’ evaluations and purchases of products or brands originating from a country. Scant research has examined the instrumental role of a country’s brands and products in the evaluations of CI. This study aims to investigate how the brands of a country contribute to CI ratings and the conditions underlying their effect on CI.

Three experimental studies test the hypotheses, one pertaining to the effect of brands on CI (N = 227), the second to the effect of products on CI (N = 116) and the third to the effect of brands and products on industry image (N = 215). The experimental approach overcomes the limitations of cross-sectional surveys commonly used in CI studies to detect the direction of the observed effects. Furthermore, respondents (British consumers) were allowed to determine the brands and products associated with a country.

Drawing on memory schema theory, across three studies, the authors identify two types of reverse inferences: from brand to CI and from product category to CI. The reverse inference from a brand to a superordinate image is stronger for industry image than for CI.

This research focuses on consumers’ evaluations from only one country (the UK). Further research could replicate the studies across different countries and with different countries of origin (COOs). Researchers could also examine the influence of brands misidentified with the wrong COO and mistakenly stored as such in consumers’ memories.

The results are relevant for managers and consultants working with country- (place-) branding campaigns. Brands and industries can help strengthen the evaluations of the economic dimension of different countries; however, these assets are underdeveloped in country-branding campaigns. Linking countries with brands and industries in campaigns could result in positive associations, which, in turn, could enhance the reputational rating of the countries.

This research extends previous studies on the effects of a country’s products and brands on CI by incorporating the mediating role of industry image between brands/products and CI, separating the effects of brand and product category on CI, allowing consumers to determine, which brands and products are associated with a country and adopting an experimental methodology to ascertain the causal direction of the effects.

This paper aims to show that strength-based theories of memory provide only a partial description of how consumers retrieve brands from memory. Dual-process theories of memory such as the Source of Activation Confusion (SAC) model provide a more robust explanation of brand retrieval by accounting for the separate effects of brand familiarity and category knowledge.

This paper examines brand image associations for 27 brands in three product categories using marketing field data. The authors apply a quasi-experimental approach to divide respondents into four groups based on their levels of brand familiarity and category knowledge. The authors compare brand retrieval for each group to test whether the SAC model, a dual-process theory of memory, or traditional strength-based theories of memory better explain brand retrieval.

Familiar brands are harder to remember when consumers know more about the product category. This effect cannot be explained by strength-based theories of memory, but it is a prediction of the SAC model. This outcome is a critical test that discriminates between competing theories of brand retrieval.

Researchers may draw on the SAC model to identify new ways of analysing brand image data to better understand how consumers retrieve brands from memory. This includes, above all, developing methods to separately measure the effects of brand familiarity and category knowledge.

To maximise the chance that consumers will remember brands, managers of highly familiar brands should avoid promoting category knowledge through their branding and communications strategies. By contrast, managers of less familiar brands should promote category knowledge by linking their brand to episodes of category consumption.

This work illustrates that a quasi-experimental approach can be used to extend quantitative psychological models from laboratory experiments to marketing field data. It also illustrates the use of a critical empirical test to discriminate between competing theories in marketing.

Research has shown that there are different dimensions of price knowledge. But it is still not clear what consumers can remember upon price exposure and what can be retrieved later and why. This research aims to focus on the influence of encoding conditions as well as price characteristics on later price recall or evaluation.

Two controlled experiments using student subjects were conducted. Participants' encoding objectives and relative price difference between paired products were manipulated and their influence on price recall and evaluation examined.

The research showed that there is usually a memory distortion of the original product price information upon retrieval. The degree of distortion is influenced by the characteristics of the prices as well as the focus of attention at encoding and the direction of distortion was influenced by consumers' beliefs of pricing norms.

In this research, price difference instead of individual price was manipulated so the interpretation of individual price recall accuracy is constrained. Future research should also examine under what conditions consumers apply a certain type of encoding objective and the effects of memory distortions on consumer choice behaviors.

Results suggest that, for marketers to clearly communicate the price information to consumers and ensure that consumers remember and use the price information as the marketers intended, it is important to examine the compatibility between price exposure environment and form of price information that consumers are likely to retrieve from memory.

The results shed further lights on understanding of consumer price information processing and retrieval.

A desirable experiential environment is an essential source of competitive advantage in the festival industry. Understanding festival attendees' experience is imperative for festival organizers because attendees' experience is a predictor of their future behavior. With the experience economy concept of Pine and Gilmore (1998), the study identified four underlying dimensions of festival attendees' experience (education, entertainment, esthetics, and escapism) and examined the impacts of these experience dimensions on festival attendees' vividity of memory and loyalty.

Data were collected from online surveys completed by 338 attendees of VEISHEA festival. This study employed confirmatory factor analysis, regression analysis, and structural equation modeling to achieve its goals.

Experience has a positive effect on vivid memory, which consequently influences loyalty. Each dimension of experience economy significantly influences vividity of memory. However loyalty is affected only by the entertainment and esthetics dimensions.

Festival marketers are advised to design activities that provide memorable experiential products and services for attendees based on the four dimensions of the experience economy.

The study is a pioneer in the evaluation of vividity of memory to the festival context.

This study aims to examine the impacts of brand congruity of in-game brand placement on esports consumers' implicit and explicit memory.

A 2 × 2 × 2 experimental design (N = 224) was used with an automobile racing game, NASCAR Heat 5. A series of statistical analyses, including MANOVA and logistic regressions, was conducted to test the proposed hypotheses.

The results revealed that ads on virtual billboards in the video game primed participants to create an implicit memory. Also, incongruent brands that were not very familiar to gamers provided greater impact than congruent brands.

This research is the first to test both implicit and explicit memory and provide practical evidence for the possibility of implicit memory building in the esports context. In addition, the current study also examined the impact of congruity to answer the previously inconsistent results.

A counterintuitive finding of existing research is that negative reviews can produce positive effects; for example, they can increase purchase likelihood and sales by increasing product awareness. It is important to continue highlighting this fact and to develop further insights into this positive effect, as a more thorough analysis can provide online retailers with a more comprehensive understanding of how to effectively manage and use negative reviews. Thus, by using an eye-tracking method, this paper attempts to provide a further thorough analysis of positive effects of negative reviews from a cognitive perspective.

An eye-tracking experiment with two tests over a time delay was performed to examine whether negative reviews have some positive effects. Review valence (positive vs. negative), brand popularity (popular vs. unpopular) and advertising exposure (no repetition vs. repetition) were considered in the experiment.

The results show that a cognitive process of attention allocation happens when consumers deal with brand popularity cues and that arousal evoking and attention allocation occur when handling review valence. Allocation of more attention to unpopular brands helps improve brand awareness and enhance brand memory, and larger arousal from negative reviews narrows attention and leads to a better memory of products and brands. However, with the passage of time, the memory of review valence can dissociate and fade, and the remaining awareness of and familiarity with unpopular brands with negative reviews contribute to a positive reversion, which leads to the production of positive effects from negative reviews.

This paper contributes to the literature on online reviews by examining the visual processing of review valence and brand popularity with an eye-tracking method and by revealing the cognitive mechanism of positive effects of negative reviews from a visual attention perspective.

The contemporary organizations invest a lot of funds to gain a better understanding of the emerging needs of customers in near future. However, customers sometimes do not appreciate these hard efforts which lead to some unanticipated results for the firm. The purpose of this paper is to identify the customers’ perceptions about the future anticipatory measures done by a company.

The authors employed triangulation of methods to develop credibility of techniques and the findings of this qualitative research study. A semi-structured interview with six participants is used to explore the phenomena. After the authors gained a better understanding about the phenomena, a focus group discussion with eight participants was held to gain a better understanding of perceptions of future. Finally, the digital ethnography was employed to better explore customer behavior.

The results show that future anticipatory efforts conducted by a company are highly appreciated by the customers. This, in turn, builds a positive autobiographical memory for customers that lead to the development of a brand relationship.

The application of futurology to study within a marketing context and the employment of autobiographical memory are unique products of this study.