Suchergebnisse

Abstract
Copycat brands imitate the trade dress of other brands, such as their brand name, logo, and packaging design. Copycats typically operate in the core product category of the imitated brand under the assumption that such "in-category imitation" is most effective. In contrast, four experiments demonstrate the benefits of "out-of-category imitation" for copycats, and the harmful effect on the imitated brand. Copycats are evaluated more positively in a related category, because consumers appraise the similarity between copycat and imitated brand more positively than in the core category, independent of the perceived similarity itself. This is due to a reduced salience of norms regarding imitation in the related category. Moreover, the results show a damaging backlash effect of out-of-category imitation on the general evaluation of the imitated brand and on its key perceived product attributes. The findings replicate across student, MTurk, and representative consumer samples; multiple product categories; and forms of brand imitation. This research demonstrates that out-of-category brand imitation helps copycat brands and hurts national leading brands much more than has so far been considered, which has managerial and public policy implications.

Abstract
The success of new incongruent products hinges largely on whether consumers can efficiently make sense of the product. One of the most efficient ways that people make sense of new objects is through feature-based association. Such associations often incorporate an enabler (e.g., the color green) to help make sense of a semantically related feature (e.g., vitamin enriched). Evidence from three studies suggests that marketers can strategically incorporate enablers in product design to help consumers make sense of an extremely incongruent feature. As a result, consumers tend to reflect more favorably on the product. Furthermore, the authors find that even if the enabler itself is incongruent and leads to lower evaluations on its own, when combined with an atypical feature the effect can still be positive. Thus, a small but semantically meaningful adjustment in design can help marketers successfully introduce extremely incongruent innovations.

Abstract
This research documents a systematic bias in memory for ethical attribute information: consumers have better memory for an ethical attribute when a product performs well on the attribute versus when a product performs poorly on the attribute. Because consumers want to avoid emotionally difficult ethical information (e.g., child labor) but believe they should remember it in order to do the right thing, the presence of negative ethical information in a choice or evaluation produces conflict between the want and should selves. Consumers resolve this conflict by letting the want self prevail and forgetting or misremembering the negative ethical information. A series of studies establishes the willfully ignorant memory effect, shows that it holds only for ethical attributes and not for other attributes, and provides process evidence that it is driven by consumers allowing the want self to prevail in order to avoid negative feelings associated with the conflict. We also ameliorate the effect by reducing the amount of pressure exerted by the should self. Lastly, we demonstrate that consumers judge forgetting negative ethical information as more morally acceptable than remembering but ignoring it, suggesting that willfully ignorant memory is a more morally acceptable form of coping with want/should conflict.