Ambiguity of Product Experience

What it is

Hoch and Ha's paper, "Consumer Learning: Advertising and the Ambiguity of Product Experience", in the Journal of Consumer Research in 1986, adopts what the authors call a hypothesis-testing framework, in which consumers treat advertisements as tentative hypotheses that can be tested through product experience. Two experiments used product categories that supplied either ambiguous or unambiguous evidence about quality. Their own summary of the first is the sentence that matters: when consumers have access to unambiguous evidence, judgements of product quality are dependent only on the objective physical evidence and unaffected by advertising, while advertising had what they call dramatic effects when the evidence was ambiguous. Hoch later split the word in two, and the split is the useful part. Vagueness, in Daniel Ellsberg's sense, is not a problem, because a person who notices the lack of clarity discounts the experience for the noise it is; it is the second sense, openness to multiple interpretations, that makes experience seductive.

In effect

Under ambiguous evidence, people in the 1986 experiments did not merely judge the product in line with the advertising. The inspection protocols recorded them searching the product differently, in a way that tended to confirm what the advertisement had told them, which is why the mechanism has its own name. The second experiment located the effect in encoding, in the authors' words by affecting how the physical evidence went in, with retrieval of advertisement-consistent evidence appearing as a lesser contribution. Young-Won Ha and Hoch returned to this in 1989 and did the theoretical work the first paper skipped, identifying structural characteristics that render evidence about product quality open to either one or multiple interpretations, which is what makes ambiguity a property you can specify in advance rather than a verdict you reach afterwards. Ha leads that paper, so calling the 1989 extension Hoch's finding is wrong.

What it does not say

It does not say advertising overrides experience. The first experiment says the opposite wherever the evidence is clear, and that null is the half of the result the trade-press version of "we see what we expect" leaves out. It also does not come with numbers. The 1986 paper is closed, its abstract gives no sample size, no product names and no effect size, and this page prints none of the three, which means the finding is carried here on the authors' own wording rather than on figures anyone can check. One further boundary is worth stating plainly: no direct replication of the 1986 result was located. The literature extended it in 1989, formalised it as the quality double whammy in 1999, moved it to memory, and found its boundary in 2004, which for a paper of this standing is a live effect repeatedly built on and never directly repeated.

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