Interesting Results
Creating Positive Attitudes
Every marketer would like customers or clients to have a positive attitude about their brand or firm, but how are these attitudes formed? The results of a 2002 experiment1 show that attitudes are a function of:
- The order in which information is encountered. Initial information tends to be more influential in attitude formation than information encountered subsequently. That’s why it’s harder to change attitudes about existing brands than to create attitudes about new brands.
- How novel a piece of information is. If customers already have a positive attitude about a brand, negative information will stand out and be given greater attention than positive information. That’s why negative information about popular brands makes the news. The reverse is also true: if customers have a negative attitude, positive information will stand out and be given greater attention than negative information.
- The previous result notwithstanding, negative information has a greater influence on attitude formation than positive information does.
1 Jacoby, Jacob, et al. (2002), “Mapping Attitude Formation as a Function of Information Input: Online Processing Models of Attitude Formation”, Journal of Consumer Psychology, 12(1), 21-34.