How Enjoyable Was It? Remembering an Affective Reaction to a Previous Consumption Experience

Consumers use affective reactions from previous exposure to experiences in decision making. However, other affective reactions derived from postexperience information (i.e., advertising) may interfere with the retrieval of experience-based reactions. The results of three experiments show that when postexperience affective reactions interfere with the retrieval of an experience-based reaction, consumers use postexperience behavior as a proxy for their liking of the experience. The use of postexperience behavior occurs even when the behavior is nondiagnostic. The results also indicate that participants are not consciously aware of the interfering effect of postexperience affective reactions or of their reliance on postexperience behavior when constructing memory.