THE MAIN PURPOSE OF A LABOR UNION / TUTORIALOUTLET DOT COM THE MAIN PURPOSE OF A LABOR UNION / TUTORIALOUTLET | Page 71

―normal‖ (within-culture) emotional responses to many stimuli (e.g.,
most Americans experience
a feeling of warmth when seeing pictures of young children with
kittens). Likewise, there are
also individual variations to this response (a person allergic to cats
might have a negative
emotional response to such a picture). Consumers confronting new
products or brands often
assign them to emotional as well as cognitive categories.82 The ad
shown in Illustration 8-6 is
likely to trigger an emotional interpretation as well as a cognitive one.
ILLUSTRATION 8-7 Colors often have learned associations that are
used in ads to convey product characteristics and
meanings.
From a psychological standpoint, consumers have natural cognitive,
emotional, and
behavioral predispositions. As just one example, some people
experience emotions more
strongly than others, a trait known as affect intensity. A number of
studies have found that
consumers who are higher in affect intensity experience stronger
emotional reactions to any
given advertisement.85 We discuss other personality differences in
Chapter 10.
Learning and Knowledge The meanings attached to such ―natural‖
things as time, space,
relationships, and colors are learned and vary widely across cultures,
as we saw in Chapter 2.
Consumers also learn about marketer-created stimuli like brands and
promotions through their
experiences with them. This experience and knowledge affects
interpretations. One general
finding is that consumers tend to interpret information in ways that
favor their preferred brands.
In one study, those higher in loyalty to a firm tended to discredit
negative publicity about the
firm and thus were less affected by it. 86 Similarly, another study