Paul Herr

Who they are

Herr holds the VA-Carolinas Professor of Purchasing Management chair and is a Professor of Marketing at Virginia Tech's Pamplin College of Business. His faculty profile lists an AB in psychology from Oberlin College and a PhD in social psychology from Indiana University, Bloomington.

The profile lists his research interests as consciousness, memory and judgement, consumer decision-making, attitude theory and brand strategy and management, and it also names strategic branding. It records service to the field as well. He is a past president of the Society for Consumer Psychology, a past co-editor of the Journal of Consumer Psychology and a former associate editor of the Journal of Consumer Research.

Key papers

The paper that matters most for this publication is Herr, Kardes and Kim (1991), in the Journal of Consumer Research, volume 17, issue 4, pages 454 to 462. As summarised from its abstract, it reports two experiments. In the first, face-to-face word of mouth was more persuasive than printed information. In the second, the word-of-mouth effect weakened or disappeared when people already had an impression of the brand in memory. The authors argue that several separate judgement effects, including the vividness, perseverance and negativity effects, can be explained by the accessibility-diagnosticity model.

A second paper in this vault's records is Herr, Sherman and Fazio (1983), "On the consequences of priming: Assimilation and contrast effects", in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, volume 19, issue 4, pages 323 to 340. Herr is first author of that paper too. It is cited elsewhere on this site for its work on priming and is not part of the argument of the review article.

Key ideas

The central idea is the accessibility-diagnosticity perspective. On it, information is used in a judgement when it comes easily to mind and when it seems to help the judgement at hand. Herr and his co-authors use the perspective to bring three effects under one account. A vivid report stays accessible, an earlier impression persists, and negative information can count for more when it is taken to be informative about what to expect.

The second idea is the role of prior knowledge. The finding that word of mouth weakened or disappeared when people already had an impression of the brand suggests that the force of a single report depends on what the listener brings to it. Rohini Ahluwalia's 2002 paper, in the same journal, raises a related point from a different direction. She notes that earlier studies of the negativity effect mostly used unknown or hypothetical targets, while shoppers often know the brands they judge, and her abstract says the robustness of the effect in consumer environments may be overstated. The two papers are linked here by the question they raise, not by any citation this site has checked.

The third idea concerns how to apply the work to reviews. Online reviews did not exist as a mass medium in 1991, and the paper's experiments used face-to-face and printed word of mouth. Applying it to a one-star review is an extrapolation. The article "Why Does One Bad Review Hurt So Much" makes that step openly and labels it as its own reading. The accessibility-diagnosticity model offers a candidate reason why a specific complaint might weigh more than general praise, and the 1991 paper does not test that claim for reviews.

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