Identity-based information processing : the role of social identity activation and identity salience on product evaluation

Abstract

This thesis calls attention to a new lens within the social identity perspective on marketing research. Specifically, marketers indicate their great interest in effective ways to persuade target consumers, including methods to influence their judgment and decisions, affect their responses to specific marketing stimuli, and so forth. In addition, as online communities bloom during this information technology era, various parties (e.g., community operators, marketers, media) become more and more anxious to target larger and larger potential consumer groups. The power of new, emerging, online consumer markets also inspires marketing scholars to explore a new perspective for targeting research. This study aims to contribute to the understanding of social identity effects on consumer behavior by studying the activation process of social identity salience and the consequent effects on identity-relevant marketing stimulus judgment and consumers’ recognition memory. This study hypothesizes that both direct identity primes and comparative distinctiveness can increase social identity salience (i.e., the activation of a social identity within a person’s social self-schema), and the strength of this identification moderates the responses to those identity primes and comparative distinctiveness traits. Across two studies, respondents exposed to an identity prime and who are comparatively distinctive express higher evaluations of advertisements that target them than do those not exposed to an identity prime and those not in comparatively distinctive situation. The data also reveal that the strength of identification moderates comparative distinctiveness but not identity prime effects. Moreover, when their social identity has been primed, people evoke identity salience and thus recall more brands and recognize more brands that feature some aspect of that identity. However, no interaction effect of strength of identification emerges. Similarly, participants in a comparative distinctive condition recall more brands and recognize more brands that feature their identity than do those in comparatively not distinctive conditions. This effect is more likely when person possess a strong social identity. This thesis concludes with some implications of these findings for social identity theory, social cognition research, and both offline and online marketing practice.