Market prominence biases in sponsor identification: Processes and consequentiality

has been recently suggested that sponsor identification may be kissed in fa vor of prominent brands. All things equal, consumers are more likely to att ribute sponsorship to brands that they perceive to be more prominent in the marketplace, such as large-share brands. This article offers additional em pirical evidence for this phenomenon and examines the underlying processes. The results of a controlled laboratory experiment replicate the phenomenon and show that this bias arises only when consumers are unable to retrieve the name of the sponsor directly from memory. In other words, direct retrie val is the default process of sponsor identification. The prominence bias i s therefore more likely to occur in cluttered media environments where lear ning the event-sponsor associations is difficult. The findings further sugg est that this bias emanates from a relatively controlled hypothesis-testing process that combines retrieval and constructive processes. During identif ication, the prominence of the brand is used as a confirmation cue that eit her validates or conflicts with people's vague recollections. The results a lso indicate that prominent brands identified or misidentified as sponsors do in fact benefit from enhanced brand image. (C) 2001 John Wiley & Sons, I nc.