Consequently, we believe that marketing and consumer research will increasingly focus how supraliminal stimuli can influence consumer behavior outside of consumers’ awareness. One example we touched on earlier is nonconscious goal pursuit. As Morsella and Bargh (2011) note, material objects can prime goals. For example, scents such as cleaning fluid can prime goals of cleanliness (Holland, Hendriks, & Aarts, 2005), seeing dollar bills can prime greed motives (Vohs, Mead, & Goode, 2006), and briefcases can prime competitiveness but backpacks cooperation (Kay, Wheeler, Bargh, & Ross, 2004). It is not too difficult to imagine that the marketing environment can be manipulated to influence goal activation. Indeed, North, Hargreaves, and McKendrick (1999) demonstrated that manipulating the type of in-store music (French vs. German) increased sales of French and German wines, respectively.
Mood and Emotion
The effects of mood and emotions on consumer behavior are well-documented. Much of marketing efforts are designed to put consumers in a more positive mood, and most of the extant marketing research has focused on the effect of mood valence. However, more recent theoretical models of emotion have expanded the inquiry to look at how different moods of the same valence (e.g., sadness vs. anger) may produce qualitatively different decisions, depending on the context. For example, Lerner and colleagues have proposed the Appraisal-Tendency Framework as a model to distinguish the effects of different types of emotions on decision-making (Han, Lerner, & Keltner, 2007; Lerner & Keltner, 2000).
They detail in particular how two similarly valenced emotions—fear and anger—produce different perceptions of risk. Fear, which is associated with low certainly, was associated with increased perceptions of risk, whereas anger, which is associated with high certainty, decreased risk perceptions. In another demonstration using different emotions having similar valences (sadness and disgust), they showed that sadness, which is associated with an appraisal theme of loss, increased choice prices, whereas disgust, which is associated with wanting to expel, reduced choice prices. In contrast, both sadness and disgust reduced selling prices (Lerner, Small, & Lowenstein, 2004). Thus, disgust eliminated the well-documented endowment effect (Kahneman, Knetsch, & Thaler, 1990), whereas sadness actually reversed it. It is important to note here that the emotions that influenced those decisions were incidental (primed by a prior irrelevant situation).
Other models of affect have also been introduced in the consumer behavior literature. For example, what is referred to as the Affect-based Evaluation and Regulation Model (Andrade & Cohen, 2007; see also Shiv, 2007), integrates both goal-directed (affect regulation) and informational (affect evaluation) properties of affect. The key contribution of this research is its focus on the underlying mediators of each component: The link between affective evaluation and behavior is mediated by cognitive appraisals, whereas the link between affective regulation and behavior is mediated by motivational appraisals. The general framework has been used to make predictions in a variety of disparate domains, including risk taking, eating, and helping behavior. Although this work and that of Lerner and colleagues has primarily focused on decision making more generally, and not persuasion in particular, the next generation of persuasion research will likely focus on applying these concepts to persuasion situations.
Social Cognitive Neuroscience
The third area we see becoming a focal area of research in the coming years is the application of social cognitive neuroscience to persuasion. Advances in neuroscience techniques now allow social and cognitive scientists to determine neural correlates of many of the mental processes that are integral parts of persuasion theories (e.g., emotions, memory, thought activation, etc.). Integrating neuroscience with persuasion theories allows for more direct tests of existing theory, potential refinements of theory, and tests of new theories (Shiv, 2007). Consider the debate around the theory of reasoned action, and its stipulation that thoughts mediate action. The use of neuroscience techniques may allow for the resolution of this debate by tracing neural outputs during persuasion situations. Similarly, the notion that certain types of cues (e.g., attractive models) may function as peripheral ones in some situations but central in others have the potential for direct tests using neuroscience techniques.
Some neuroscience research on persuasion has already begun to test aspects of the persuasion process and existing persuasion theory. For example, results from fMRI scans have been shown to predict behavior change over and above self-reports (Falk, Berkman, Mann, Harrison, & Lieberman, 2010). In tests associated with the elaboration likelihood model, fMRI scans were used to investigate the neural processes that predict effects of source expertise on attitude development and change (Klucharev, Smidts, & Fernandez, 2008). Neuroscience techniques have been used to document actual changes in perceptions of pain resulting from placebos (Wager et al., 2004), to show that cognitive dissonance occurs automatically independent of explicit memory (Lieberman, Ochsner, Gilbert, & Schacter, 2001; see also Shiv, 2007), and that the “pain of paying” is more than a metaphor by showing that spending money activates an area of the brain that is also active during the experience of physical pain (Knutson, Rick, Wimmer, Prelec, & Lowenstein, 2007).
Conclusion
* * *
As noted in the introduction, persuasion is all around us, and even more so in a consumer society such as the U.S., where marketing and persuasion are virtually synonymous. Thus, where better to understand persuasion principles, develop new research questions, and test new persuasion models than the marketplace? The different streams of research reviewed here just touch on the many different theories of persuasion that have application to marketing contexts. Rather than take a comprehensive approach to reviewing persuasion theories and applications in marketing, we have attempted to highlight the theories that have had the most recent impact. Across those theories, there are important overlaps as well as differences. Many of the differences were developed as researchers noted that current models had difficulty accounting for certain patterns of data. That will surely continue, and so new discoveries should be welcome but not surprising.
One type of new discovery that we highlighted at the end of this chapter pertains to nonconscious processing. This represents one of the exciting new frontiers in persuasion research, as researchers attempt to determine just what types of judgments are conscious and which ones are driven by more automatic (nonconscious) responses to stimuli. As researchers attempt to answer the question of what consciousness is actually good for (Bargh & Chartrand, 1999; Baumeister, Mele, & Vohs, 2010), the more we learn about what types of consumer judgments are actually driven by nonconscious processes. Although it is perhaps uncomfortable to realize how little control we actually have over daily decisions, the more we learn about how these persuasion processes work, the better we should be at making good decisions.
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