J. Kim et al., AN INVESTIGATION OF THE MEDIATIONAL MECHANISMS UNDERLYING ATTITUDINALCONDITIONING, Journal of marketing research, 33(3), 1996, pp. 318-328
The authors examine the two principal mechanisms that have been propos
ed as possible explanations for the effects of classical conditioning
procedures in attitude-shaping applications. They report two experimen
ts that test conditioning procedures for prompting inferential beliefs
, versus transferring affect, as means to influencing brand attitudes.
Both studies use an established empirical paradigm for shaping brand
attitudes with pictures or visual images as the unconditioned stimuli.
The results indicate that brand attitudes can be conditioned using bo
th attractive images that promote direct affect transfer and descripti
ve visual images that promote inferential belief formation. These data
suggest that conditioning procedures can produce multiple benefits wh
en they are applied in selecting and arranging the nonverbal cues to b
e featured in an advertising campaign.