“Yes, I Can” or “No, I Can’t” – Effect of Extraneous Affirmation- and Negation-Evoking Contexts on Brand Recall Memory: The Role of Semantic Activations

In the real world, consumers often draw up a shopping list by recalling brand names. Lynch Jr and Srull (1982) classified such choice options as “memory-based”. If consumers cannot recall a brand, they are less likely to consider it, and therefore, purchase it. Consequently, factors that affect memory-based choices are important practically and theoretically. Our research focuses on how (i.e., the phenomenon) and why (i.e., the psychological mechanism) the recall of brands could be impacted by extraneous brand placement contexts that evoke a negation versus an affirmation (such as a “NO” versus a “YES”). Our research is the first to show that an entirely unrelated negation (vs. affirmation) in a brand’s placement context leads to impaired brand recall memory. The principal contribution of our work is the investigation of the underlying mechanism. We demonstrate that negations spontaneously generate negation-related semantic associations, which through a spreading activation mechanism (Collins and Loftus 1975) influences brand recall memory. Specifically, we show that the nature of these negation-related semantically activated concepts, decreases consumers’ “general judgments of importance” toward discrete consumer issues, which in turn impairs brand recall memory. Extant research has shown that negation is associated with cognitive inhibition, and latencies (Carpenter and Just 1975; Giora et al. 2007; Kaup and Zwaan 2003). A negation operator prevents the activation of the core concept or schema being negated (MacDonald and Just 1989).