Assessing the Role of Brand-Related Cognitive Responses as Mediators of Communication Effects on Cognitive Structure

We tested the cognitive response model of communication effects in an experiment in which subjects were exposed to brand advertisements with the goal of evaluating either the advertised brand or the ad itself. The results suggest that brand-related cognitive responses are the primary mediators of ad effects on cognitive structure variables, but only for subjects who had a brand evaluation goal. For subjects with an ad evaluation goal, cognitive responses about both the brand and the ad appeared to mediate independently about equal amounts of the message-induced variation in cognitive structure variables. Implications of these findings for future communication research are discussed.