The Experimental Research On Cognitive Processing Mechanism Underlying Consumers' Brand Decision Making

Over the past 40 years, brand decision, which refers to consumers' choice, has been one of the most important issues in the decision research literature. It is a dynamic process of determining strategy in which consumers chose or judge a brand using their perception, attention, memory, thinking and other cognitive abilities. With respect of the researches in the field of brand decision, there are two main methods, one is structural analysis; the other is process-tracing, which can be found in most of the literature. And the overwhelming theory describing brand decision-making is the cognitive processing model. This theory holds that consumers need explain or understand the significance of the information in the environment around them. Consumers will generate a wide range of knowledge and beliefs during the process of interpretation and understanding, and these may be stored in their memory, and then they were activated for the integration process. At the same time, the knowledge about the products in memory may even be continuously activated because it is linked to other ideas. Through the expansion of activation, all the stored information in consumer's mind about the products can be retrievaled as his online memory in order to make decision on brands. Consumer's online memory, especially retrievaled fastly alternatives, will influence his overall evaluation on brands, and the ultimate choice will be selected among retrievaled options.Considerations about consumer brand decision making can be divided into two parts, one is about the factors which has influence on brand decision, the other is decision making strategies used on brand choice. The former concerns the external and internal factors for brand decision, whereas the latter deals with the search of using linear or non-linear strategy to decision maker. There is a lack of researches conducted in the cognitive process of decision making imposed upon the consumer brand decision, and those results don't conform to each other, which call for future research. What's more, there is still some bewilderment with the exploring on the strategies of the consumer-brand-decision. To further discuss the issues raised above and give a comprehensive demonstration to the cognitive processing mechanism underlying consume brand decision making, this article includes four parts:The first part was document review, in which the history of researches on brand choice were retrospected systematically as well as the state-of-the-art of the topic. Main theories and representative ideas with these different theoretical perspectives were also demonstrated respectively. Several important issues that need further clarifications and investigations on brand choice were put forward. Besides, relevant theoretical hypotheses aiming at the explanation of the above issues were promoted correspondingly.The second part included 6 studies and 7 experiments. The results are as follows: (1) Brand perception (Perceived Brand/non-Perceived Brand) and the categories of the products influence decision making significantly. And there is significant difference between perceived brand and non-perceived on brand decision. (2) Brand consciousness level (strong/weak) and implicit self-esteem (high/low) join together and serve as two other factors for brand decision. The subjects with high level of implicit self-esteem and high level of brand consciousness were inclined to chose a strong brand, while the subjects with low-level of implicit self-esteem but high brand awareness will be gradually reduced on the tendency to choose a strong brand. And the subjects with low level of implicit and low brand consciousness were more inclined to choose a weak brand. (3) The cognitive style of the consumers had noted influence on brand choice. No matter the products were durable or not, the consumers with field-independent cognitive style were inclined to choose a weak brand, whereas the consumers with the field-dependence cognitive style tend to choose a strong one. (4) Perception Negativity had impact notably on consumer brand decisions. Further analysis shows that the internal attributes of with negative perception were more easy to arouse consumers' negative attitude towards brands than the external attributes, and consequentially affected consumers' preference, purchase intent and motivation to a brand. (5) The effect of role variables on brand decision was not significant, while the effect of emotion on brand decision was significant. Positive emotion accelerate the process of decision, but negative emotions would inhibit the retrieval of brand information. (6) When the subjects made the brand decision, the subjects with high task motivation selected information mostly within brand, while the subjects with the low task motivation mostly used across-brands' information no matter the time pressure was high or not.Part three was general discussions. Based on the empirical researches in this thesis, a suite of issues were discussed profoundly and extensively, including the association between brand and the qualities of brand decision, the validity and the mechanism of brand decision as well as the management of brand and the consumer brand decision. And the research and managial suggestions of brand decision was promoted.Part four, a prospect of further studies on brand decision was proposed from such aspects as the methods,mechanism and implicit emotion of the brand decision and the influence of time pressure on brand decision...