| American society is often referred to as one that is extremely materialistic (Richins, McKeage, and Najjar 1992). In fact, the acquisition of material possessions is considered to be of central importance in the attainment of the "good life" by many American consumers. Furthermore, there is evidence of increasing illustrations of materialistic values in advertising over the last several decades with emphasis on luxury and pleasure seeking.;The purpose of this research is to examine the effect that material/nonmaterial value systems, products, and advertising have on consumer judgment and evaluation processes. Specifically, this research will draw upon Sherif and Hovland's (1961) social judgment theory, which asserts that evaluations of social stimuli can be affected by the context in which they are judged. According to the theory, individuals possess internal contexts such as values and beliefs, and external contexts such as people, objects, and norms that can have an effect on the classification and evaluation of social stimuli. Thus, by serving as a source of comparison, it is expected that people use materialistic internal and external contexts in their processing of information.;Hypotheses were generated concerning anticipated context effects. Specifically, by manipulating the amount of similarity, with regard to materialistic orientations, between target information presented in an ad and an external context or internal context, assimilation and contrast effects were investigated.;In order to test these hypotheses, two experiments were conducted. Experiment 1 focused on the impact of an external context (i.e., a print advertisement background) on the processing of a target stimulus (i.e., product information in the ad), while Experiment 2 focused on the impact of a primed internal context (i.e., material values) on the processing of an advertising stimulus. Judgments, evaluations, and purchase intention measures served as the dependent variables.;Results support the notion that materialistic contexts, both internal and external can impact consumers' judgments and evaluations of an advertised product, and the overall ad itself. These results are useful to advertising practitioners, and have theoretical implications in the areas of assimilation/contrast effects and for the construct of materialism. |
