Effects of Different Types of Schematic Support on Item and Associative Memory for Brands in Older Consumers

Brand memory is central to brand equity (Keller 1993) (Keller 1993) as well as consumer decision making (Hoyer and Brown 1990; Warlop, Ratneshwar, and van Osselaer 2005; Yoon et al. 2005). It is well established that memory declines with age (Kausler 1994; Salthouse 1991 ). But episodic memory, that retains contextual information about personally experienced events in one’s life, such as the contents, time, and place of the occurrences (Lachman, Lachman, and Butterfield 1979, 215), seems to be especially vulnerable to aging (Light 1991). Given that brand-based experiences with products—whether with the products themselves or marketing communications thereof—get stored in the episodic memory system of the consumer (Alba, Hutchinson, and Lynch Jr 1991; Kahn and Wansink 2004), the issue of memory deficits in older consumers is particularly problematic for marketers targeting the elderly, a very important consumer segment today.