Selective Recall and Information Use in Consumer Preferences

This study investigated the relation between consumers' memory and use of information in judging brand preferences. The authors used ads to test hypotheses about how pictorial and verbal presentations of previously encountered information and the content of subsequently encountered information affect recall and information use in shaping brand preferences. Even when subjects more easily recalled.pictured attributes than verbally described attributes, this picture superiority effect did not influence memory-based preferences. In contrast, externally available information for an alternative brand influenced both recall and preferences. The overall pattern of results suggests that enhancing recallability improves the likelihood that consumers will use a piece of information to compare brands only if other information is unavailable or inadequate. Copyright 1992 by the University of Chicago.