Between Two Brands: A Goal Fluency Account of Brand Evaluation

The authors present the results of two studies that show how consumers' evaluations of an advertised product can be influenced by the compatibility or conflict between the regulatory goals (promotion or prevention) addressed by the product and prior advertising of related products. Participants across both studies were exposed sequentially to the advertising of two products (prime and target), and they demonstrated a regulatory goal fluency effect in their evaluations of the target brand. When the regulatory goal serviced by the target matched (conflicted with) the regulatory goal serviced by the prime, participants indicated higher (lower) purchase intent (Experiment 1) and more favorable evaluations of the target brand (Experiment 2). These effects were not accounted for by differences in participants' involvement or affective state across the conditions. Instead, mediation analyses show that participants' ease of processing the target advertisement underlies the effect of goal compatibility on brand evaluation.