‘So, what is it? And do I like it?’ New product categorisation and the formation of consumer implicit attitude

Prior literature on knowledge transfer learning suggests that cognitive effort is required to categorise new products and to develop attitudes toward them. This study investigates whether a single exposure to category-related cues of a new product can trigger successful categorisation and lead to attitude formation. A total of 250 respondents were confronted with a fictitious new product, in condition of either high- or low-attention devoted to the new product. We found that a single exposure to category-related cues of a new product not only led to the participants’ categorisation of the new product into the targeted category independently of the attention level, but also shaped their implicit and explicit attitudes toward the new product. However, a minimum level of attention was required to observe the formation of implicit attitudes while explicit attitudes were not fully developed.