Consumer Learning: Advertising and the Ambiguity of Product Experience

This paper examines the influence of advertising on how an ~ what consumers learn from product experience. A hypothesis-testing framework IS adopted where con-sumers treat advertisements as tentative hypotheses that can be tested through product experience. Two experiments were conducted using product categer!es that provided either ambiguous or unambiguous evidence about product quality. The first experiment showed that when consumers have access t ~ u~ambiguc.us evidence, judgments of product quality are dependent onl ~ ~ the ObjectlV ~ phySICal evidence and unaffected by advertising. However, advertiSing had dramatiC effects on perceptions of quality when consumers saw ambiguous ev~de~; judgments and product inspection behavior protocols showed that advertising Induced c0n-sumers to engage in confirmatory hypothesis testing and search. The ~d ex-periment showed that advertising influenced quality judgmen~s by affecting the en-coding of the physical evidence; retrieval of ad-conslstent evidence also appeared to occur, though to a lesser degree. W hat do consumers learn from advertising? One possibility is that ads provide rules about con-