Category-based, piecemeal, and contrast processes underlying product evaluations: Their determinants and consequences

It has been suggested that when consumers make an evaluative judgment of a product, they sometimes categorize the product and make their judgment on the basis of the likability of the category (category-based processes); other times they integrate the likability of the individual attributes of the product to reach a judgment (piecemeal processes). As a third possibility, they also make their judgment by contrasting the description of product attributes with their category knowledge (contrast processes). This research investigated the conditions under which consumers engage in these different modes of information processing when evaluating a product, i.e., category-based, piecemeal, and contrast processing, which should result in different types of judgmental effects, i.e., assimilation, attribute, and contrast effects, respectively. It was hypothesized that the different types of processing and judgmental effects will be determined by (1) the degree of (in)consistency between the incoming information and category expectations and (2) the level of involvement with the judgment task.Two laboratory experiments were conducted where these two factors were manipulated. Results of Experiment 1 suggest that different types of judgmental effects are a function of information consistency and involvement: assimilation effects were found when the target information was consistent with category knowledge, or when it was moderately inconsistent and subjects were not highly involved with the evaluation task; attribute effects were obtained when the target information was extremely inconsistent and subjects were highly involved with the judgment task. Findings of Experiment 2 also indicate that the alternative modes of processing are determined by the two factors, consistency and involvement.Implications of the results for consumer information processing are discussed, along with practical implications for product positioning and promotion strategies.U of I OnlyETDs are only available to UIUC Users without author permissio