Post-Experience Advertising

What it is

Braun's paper, in the Journal of Consumer Research, describes the situation in her own words as an instant source-forgetting problem, and the consequence as a reconstructive memory process through which the advertising information affects how and what consumers remember. Kathryn Braun-LaTour and colleagues later ran the paradigm with false cues across three studies and found that when the false information went undetected it was processed much as more truthful cues were. Elizabeth Loftus is fourth author on that paper, which is the misinformation effect being run on a product memory by people who built the misinformation paradigm. Credit Braun-LaTour first and Loftus as a co-author, not the reverse.

In effect

The boundary arrived in 2004 and expertise reverses the effect. Elizabeth Cowley and Eunika Janus gave people grapefruit juice and then showed them advertisements claiming the brand was orange juice. Less familiar consumers were somewhat more likely to remember having tasted an orange and grapefruit blend, while more familiar consumers were significantly less likely to misremember after seeing the misleading advertisements, apparently using them to work out exactly what they had drunk. Stephen Hoch and John Deighton's 1989 framework had already named familiarity as one of its three moderators, so the literature predicted its own boundary and then found it.

What it does not say

It does not say information arriving after an experience changes what people prefer. Leonard Lee, Shane Frederick and Dan Ariely's beer study disclosed a secret ingredient either before or after tasting, and preference moved only when the disclosure came first. Post-experience influence is therefore real for memory and unreliable for preference, and the two must not be run together. The evidential limits are tight: Braun's paper is closed and its abstract gives no number of experiments, no sample sizes and no figures, Cowley and Janus's gives no samples or effect sizes, and the Braun-LaTour paper gives neither, so everything on this page rests on the authors' descriptions of their own results.

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