@article{2019:teichert:measures_o,
title = {Measures of Implicit Cognition for Marketing Research},
year = {2019},
note = {Academics and managers need to know that key mental processes occur
below the conscious awareness threshold. While unconscious processes
largely influence consumer decision-making processes, self-report
measures do not reveal these processes adequately. Consequently,
marketers need to utilise psychologists’ indirect measures that
infer unconscious mental content from reaction-time tasks. Three
well-known tools are explicated in the present article: the Emotional
Stroop Task, the Implicit Association Test (IAT), and the
Approach-Avoidance Task (AAT). Each test taps into a different facet
of implicit cognition. This research describes these test
instruments’ experimental setups and alternative procedures to guide
academics and practitioners when they apply implicit measures. The Ask
Your Brain (AYB) survey software is presented as an online research
platform for executing all three test types and provides a
cost-efficient alternative to lab experiments. In this paper’s
conceptual part, we outline the three test instruments’ research
paradigms and describe their past applications in the marketing
domain. We describe each implicit measurement instrument’s
conceptual background, summarize its standard test procedures, and
briefly discuss relevant methodological criticisms. We describe how
the obtained measurement data should be prepared, condensed, and
analysed. Subsequently, we present an empirical case to illustrate the
concrete application of the different measurement instruments,
utilising empirical data gained from a consumer protection study of
104 South African students. These young adults were confronted with
alcohol stimuli in the Emotional Stroop Task, IAT, and AAT. They
subsequently performed a discrete choice task related to alcoholic
drinks and soft drinks. Based on their drink choices, we explore the
extent to which the implicit measures relate to their choice
behaviour. The Emotional Stroop Task is based on the premise that
emotional stimuli attract more visual attention than neutral stimuli.
This distraction causes a delay in response when participants are
asked to name a displayed word's colour as fast as possible. Although
our study could not directly support this premise, alcohol-inclined
participants generally reacted more slowly to alcohol and neutral
stimuli. The IAT confronts participants with combinations of a bipolar
target category and a bipolar attribute category. Category
combinations corresponding to the respondent's intuition (compatible)
facilitate task performance and result in shorter reaction times. In
our study, those individuals who chose significantly more drinks
containing alcohol reacted faster to combinations of “alcohol” and
“active” (rather than “alcohol” and “miserable”). This
finding shows that the IAT can indeed predict choice behaviour.
Finally, the AAT postulates that individuals move faster to a desired
object and away from an undesired object. Both the reaction times and
the error rates indicated this pattern. Individuals were slower and
produced more errors during incongruent tasks (push positive items;
pull negative items) than congruent tasks (pull liked items, push
disliked items). This finding show that implicit measures can identify
consumers´ approach and avoidance tendencies. This paper provides
methodological insights into three prominent implicit cognition
measures, as well as practical suggestions for practitioners and
academics. We exemplify each method’s usage for research questions
in marketing and consumer research. We particularly suggest using the
Emotional Stroop Task for studies on attention-based processes, for
example, advertisement exposure. The IAT is recommended for assessing
richer cognitive processes, such as product or brand images, and the
AAT when studying visceral and biological influences on impulsive
consumption. Overall, we encourage marketing researchers to add
implicit measures to their toolbox and to explore their contributions
further for a better understanding of consumer decision making.},
journal = {Marketing ZFP},
pages = {48--76},
author = {Teichert, Thorsten and Graf, Alexander and Rezaei, Sajad and Wörfel, Philipp and Duh, Helen},
volume = {41},
number = {3}
}