Eric R. Spangenberg

University of California, Irvine | UCI · The Paul Merage School of Business

The familiar state of tension associated with an incomplete collection or an unfinished jigsaw puzzle is predicted by Lewin’s (1926; 1935) field theory. This feeling evokes a drive to completion—a phenomenon we label the incompleteness effect —which is useful to marketers endeavoring to cross-sell products and services. In three studies using onlin...

Branding research has explored the processes underlying consumers’ engagement with brands, with research exploring both dispositional and situational forms of engagement. Despite this work, scholars have yet to examine the relationship between dispositional and situational approaches to brand engagement. In the current chapter, we report the result...

Previous research on self-brand connections has not considered the inclusion of brand categories (e.g., national and private brands). The current work examines consumers’ preference for national and private brands and their tendency to include brands as part of their self-concept (measured by the brand engagement in the self-concept (BESC) scale an...

Asking people a question about performing a target behavior influences future performance of that behavior. While contextually robust and methodologically simple, this “question-behavior effect” reveals theoretical complexity as evidenced by the large number of proposed explanations for the effect. Furthermore, considerable heterogeneity exists reg...

As many as 90% of Fortune 500 companies have integrated explicit corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives into their marketing actions, taking visible steps to communicate their socially responsible actions to consumers (Lichtenstein, Drumwright, and Braig 2004*). One of the most dominant recent CSR platforms is adopting environmentally fr...

Although there is increased awareness of issues surrounding consumer well-being, consumers often lack the personal commitment to improve their quality of life. This article builds on the concept of a goal hierarchy to propose that small acts may have unintended, large consequences on various domains of consumer well-being. A decrease in commitment...

When configuring a customized product, consumers must decide which product features to include. While many times firms allow consumers to add features to a base item (hereinafter referred to as additive option framing), it is also possible in some settings to remove undesired features from a fully equipped product (subtractive option framing). At t...

Market information about service providers and retailers can significantly influence how customers view firms. Prior research indicates that the impact of such information (especially when it is counter to consumers’ initial views of a firm) is dependent upon the nature of the customers’ evaluations, as well as the nature of the information itself....

Three studies investigated the effects of consumer skepticism toward advertising on responses to ads. Consumer skepticism, defined as the tendency toward disbelief of advertising claims, is measured by each study and then related to various measures of advertising response, including brand beliefs, ad attitudes, responses to informational and emoti...

Although ambient scents within retail stores have been shown to influence shoppers, real-world demonstrations of scent effects are infrequent and existing theoretical explanation for observed effects is limited. The current research addresses these open questions through the theoretical lens of processing fluency. In support of a processing fluency...

Answering a question about performance of a behavior influences the probability of a person performing a target action in the future. Although this question-behavior effect has been shown across multiple contexts, several theoretical mechanisms have been suggested to drive the effect. While various explanations have been offered for the question-be...

Though practitioners have relied on tempo as a criterion to design in-store music, scant attention has been devoted to the mode of musical selections, and no consideration has been given to the potential for the interactive effects of low-level structural elements of music on actual retail sales. The current research reports a field experiment wher...

Does asking people about their future behavior increase or decrease the likelihood that they will repeat their past behavior? In two laboratory and two field experiments, we find that behavior prediction strengthens behavior repetition, making people more likely to do what they normally do, when personal norms regarding engaging in a behavior are w...

This study of the meanings of possessions displayed in the offices of employees in a high technology firm suggests extensions to the concept of extended self. Work self and home self contend for dominance in these displays. Employees must decide which aspects of the self belong to the domain of work and which belong elsewhere. In these ongoing nego...

Brand engagement in self-concept (BESC) is a generalized view of brands in relation to the self, with consumers varying in their tendency to include important brands as part of their self-concepts. The authors develop an eight-item scale to measure BESC and demonstrate that it captures a consumer's general engagement with brands. This scale success...

We examine how individual differences in the consideration of future consequences (Strathman et al., 1994) impact trait self-control, and temporal discounting under conditions of ego-depletion. Study 1 (N = 986) reveals that the CFC scale contains two underlying factors, which can be labeled the CFC-Immediate (CFC-I) and CFC-Future (CFC-F) sub-scal...

Question–behavior research has frequently demonstrated that asking questions about future behaviors increases the performance of socially normative behaviors. In response to Fitzsimons and Moore's review (2008) of the question–behavior effect in the context of risky behaviors, we consider how asking questions about an undesirable behavior may incre...

Retailers can benefit from allowing customers to touch their products. The influence of tactile input on evaluation, however, remains undemonstrated in the literature. In four experiments, effects of tactile input were observed for product categories wherein tactile input was diagnostic, and depended on product quality. While this effect was modera...

Although we know that many behaviors are repeated, we know little about what influences the strength and likelihood of behavior repetition. In this paper, we argue that asking people to predict their future behavior increases the chances that they will repeat what they have done in the past when normative beliefs are weak but reduces the likelihood...

Two laboratory studies investigate how behavior prediction and personal norms interact to influence whether or not people repeat their past behavior. We find that asking people about their future behavior increases their likelihood of repeating past behaviors when personal norms are weak but reduces it when personal norms are strong. By identifying...

Ambient scent in a retail environment can influence consumers with such effects likely moderated by congruity between the scent and the retailer's product offering. Prior research does not document such congruity effects for products without an inherent scent and in real-world settings. This article addresses these shortcomings by exploring the eva...

This study examined the attendees'attitudes toward festivals by utilizing a two-dimensional consumer attitude scale, the Hedonic/Utilitarian (HED/UT) Scale, developed by Voss, Spangenberg, and Grohmann. The HED/UT Scale was originally developed to measure the hedonic and utilitarian dimensions of consumer attitudes toward product categories and dif...

Modification of behavior is an important goal for organizations desiring to improve the healthfulness of a society. Unfortunately, many strategies used to affect health-related behaviors (e.g., health beliefs model) are relatively complex and sometimes difficult to apply. A strategy potentially more useful for achieving such behavior change is self...

Researchers have consistently shown that questioning people about a future behavior influences the subsequent performance of that behavior. Since its first demonstration by Sherman (1980), two groups of researchers have built parallel streams of research investigating the self‐prophecy and mere‐measurement phenomenon. Both sets of scholars have cle...

People asked to make a self-prediction about a socially normative behavior are significantly more likely (than a comparable control group) to perform the behavior in a manner consistent with social norms. Making a behavioral self-prediction has been demonstrated to increase attendance to a health club, consumption of healthy snacks, and commitment...

Having people predict whether they will perform a socially normative behavior increases their probability of performing that target action. Recent empirical evidence supports a dissonance-based theoretical explanation for this self-prophecy effect. While the effect is robust, few boundary conditions have been identified. We report two experiments w...

Recent research suggests consumers view brands anthropomorphically and often form self-connections with a particular brand. To date, however, no research has explored whether consumers vary with regard to their tendency to form such connections. In the current research, we conceptualize Brand-Extended Self-Construal (BESC) as the propensity for a c...

While extant research suggests that olfactory and musical stimuli can influence individuals' perceptions and behaviors, the combined or interactive effects of these environmental cues is not well understood. Using stimuli associated with the Christmas holiday season, this research explores the joint effects of ambient scent and music on consumers'...

Three studies examined the relationship between individual differences in the consideration of future consequences (CFC; Strathman, Gleicher, Boninger, & Edwards, 1994) and fiscal responsibility. In Studies 1 and 2, low levels of CFC were associated with high levels of self-reported impulsive buying tendencies (Verplanken & Herabadi, 2001) and temp...

There is a dearth of empirically supported theoretical explanation since its introduction; Feinberg's 1986 credit card effect showed greater product valuations and donation intentions by experimental participants when asked to make such estimates in the presence of credit card stimuli. This comment on McCall, Trombetta, and Gipe (2004) notes potent...

A shortcoming of Internet-based retailing efforts is consumers' inability to touch products during their purchase decision-making processes. This research is a preliminary effort to examine the construct of need for tactile input by consumers and its impact on the likelihood to purchase products over the Internet. Initial measurement of the constru...

This article reports the development and validation of a parsimonious, generalizable scale that measures the hedonic and utilitarian dimensions of consumer attitudes toward product categories and different brands within categories. The hedonic/utilitarian (HED/UT) scale includes ten semantic differential response items, five of which refer to the h...

Asking people to predict whether they will undertake a target behavior increases their probability of performing that behavior. Now referred to as the self-prophecy effect, this phenomenon has been demonstrated across several contexts. Although theoretical explanations for the effect have been offered, empirical evidence for proposed accounts is sp...

Marketers often promote socially beneficial actions or discourage anti-social behaviors to the benefit of their firms, target markets, and society at large. One means by which such influence may be accomplished is through use of a technique referred to as the self-prophecy effect—the behavioral influence of a person making a self-prediction. Prior...

A shortcoming of Internet-based retailing efforts is consumers' inability to touch products during their purchase decision-making processes. This research is a preliminary effort to examine the construct of need for tactile input by consumers and its impact on the likelihood to purchase products over the Internet. Initial measurement of the constru...

Three replications of a double -blind experiment tested subliminal audiotape products that were claimed to improve memory or to increase selfesteem. Conditions of use adhered to manufacturers' recommendations, and subjects (N = 237) were limited to persons who desired the effects offered by the tapes. Actual content and labeled content of tapes wer...

Two studies were conducted to investigate the origin and distinctness of consumer skepticism toward advertising, defined as a tendency to disbelieve advertising claims by Obermiller and Spangenberg (1998). The first study examined the role of socialization in the family by comparing levels of ad skepticism across generations. Significant associatio...

The self-prophecy phenomenon served as the basis for a simple, inexpensive technique aimed at increasing donations in a telephone fundraising drive. Self-prophecy is predicated on two psychological effects. First, asking people to make predictions about normatively influenced behaviours results in biased responses—people respond as they think they...

This article extends research linking shopping behavior to environmental factors through changes in emotional states. With time fixed or variable during a simulated shopping experiment, shoppers were exposed to music varying by degree of familiarity. Afterward, subjects reported their perceptions of shopping duration, their emotional states, and th...

A study was conducted to determine the level of perceived similarity by consumers among college students viewing two products with similar trade dress—the recently litigated Kendall-Jackson “Vintner’s Reserve” and Gallo “Turning Leaf” brands of Chardonnay table wine. Using an Internet-based data collection method, this study found only one signific...

Asking people to predict whether they will perform a target action often increases the probability of their performing that action. This article reviews published and unpub- lished research evidence for this "self-prophecy" phenomenon and reports 2 new ex- periments. The studies reviewed demonstrate that the self-prophecy effect occurs in a variety...

A 9-item Likert-type scale was developed to measure consumer skepticism toward advertising Skepticism toward advertising, defined as the general tendency toward disbelief of advertising claims, was hypothesized to be a basic marketplace belief that vanes across individuals and is related to general persuasability. A nomological network was proposed...

Prior research has shown that asking people to anonymously predict whether they will perform a socially desirable behavior increases their probability of performing the action (Sherman, 1980). This article extends the empirical base of the phenomenon in a consumer service context demonstrating that an anonymous prediction request can increase likel...

Word‐of‐mouth (WOM) communication is introduced within a hierarchy‐of‐effects context. The results of a laboratory experiment suggest that amount of WOM information about products is less important than valence of that information. Counter to previous research implying a disproportionate influence of negative information on product evaluation, nega...

Cheating in college is widely acknowledged as a serious problem. A review of the research on cheating suggests adequate understanding of it but little insight into solutions. A psychological phenomenon referred to as the self-prophecy effect is reviewed and proposed as the basis for an intervention based on asking students to predict whether they w...

The popular press has recently reported that managers of retail and service outlets are diffusing scents into their stores to create more positive environments and develop a competitive advantage. These efforts are occurring despite there being no scholarly research supporting the use of scent in store environments. The authors present a review of...

The popular press has recently reported that managers of retail and service outlets are diffusing scents into their stores to create more positive environments and develop a competitive advantage. These efforts are occurring despite there being no scholarly research supporting the use of scent in store environments. The authors present a review of...

Drawing primarily from categorization theory, this paper presents justification for the effects of word-of-mouth (WOM) communication on product category involvement. Results of an empirical test of this relationship are presented showing an enduring effect of positive WOM communication on product category involvement; this effect was not found for...

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A bidimensional (hedonic/utilitarian) approach to understanding consumer attitudes was recently introduced by Batra and Ahtola (1991); they reported three construct validation studies and proposed a set of items to measure the construct(s). In the present paper, the Batra and Ahtola (1991) scales are applied to a wide variety of product categories....

Three replications of a double-blind experiment tested subliminal audiotape products that were claimed to improve memory or to increase self-esteem. Conditions of use adhered to manufacturers' recommendations, and subjects (N = 237) were limited to persons who desired the effects offered by the tapes. Actual content and labeled content of tapes wer...

Describes an experiment conducted comparing the effects of background and foreground music on clothing store shoppers. Concludes that choosing to play store music solely to satisfy customers' preferences may not be the optimal approach; instead music should be varied across areas of a store that appeal to different-aged customers.

After a review of research on the use of store music, an experiment was conducted comparing the effects of background and foreground music on clothing store shoppers. In-store interviews revealed a preference for foreground music but customers’ moods and unplanned purchases were not substantially enhanced by hearing foreground music. However, custo...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1990. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [67]-70).