How personal are consumer brand evaluations?: disentangling the role of personal and extrapersonal and extrapersonal associations in consumer judgments

Research in social psychology suggests that consumers may rely on both personal and extrapersonal associations when making memory-based judgments. Building on recent advances in implicit attitude measurement, we identify factors determining whether consumers are more likely to rely on personal or extrapersonal associations when making brand judgments. In a first study, we show that consumer expertise affects the role of personal vs. extrapersonal associations in brand evaluations. Specifically, we show that novices’ brand evaluations are predominantly based on extrapersonal associations while experts’ brand evaluations are mostly based on personal associations. Implications of these results are discussed and details on our further experiments are provided.