The Effect of Brand Commitment on the Evaluation of Nonpreferred Brands: A Disconfirmation Process

This research finds that high- and low-commitment consumers use different information-processing strategies when exposed to competitive brand information. High-commitment consumers use a disconfirmatory processing strategy, focusing on the dissimilarities between their preferred brand and the competitor brand. Low-commitment consumers focus on the similarities between the advertised brand and their preferred brand. These processing differences lead to differences in the evaluation of a competitive brand between high- and low-commitment consumers. However, priming high-commitment consumers to focus on the similarities and low-commitment consumers on the dissimilarities between their preferred brand and a competitor brand mitigates the effects of the different processing strategies. (c) 2008 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..