Frank R. Kardes

Frank R. Kardes
University of Cincinnati | UC · Department of Marketing

Ph.D.

About

151
Publications
124,696
Reads
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14,368
Citations
Introduction
Frank R. Kardes, Ph.D. is the Donald E. Weston Professor of Marketing and Distinguished Research Professor at the Lindner College of Business at the University of Cincinnati. He is a recipient of the Distinguished Scientific Achievement Award of the Society for Consumer Psychology, and a Fellow of five national professional societies. His research focuses on omission neglect, consumer judgment and inference processes, persuasion and advertising, and consumer and managerial decision making. He was Co-Editor of Advances in Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology, the Handbook of Consumer Psychology, and Marketing Letters, and has served on seven editorial boards.
Additional affiliations
September 1989 - present
University of Cincinnati
Position
  • Donald E. Weston Professor of Marketing
Education
September 1982 - November 1986
Indiana University Bloomington
Field of study
  • Psychology

Publications

Publications (151)
Article
Full-text available
Five experiments were conducted to explore trait impulsivity as a possible contributor to the magnitude of the Brand Positivity Effect, and to provide a more sophisticated empirical account of the role of selective processing in driving it than reported in prior research. Although the experiments considered very different choice categories includin...
Article
Full-text available
A consumer's evaluation of an entity in the marketplace, such as a product or service provider, is one of the most important factors in determining whether or not they consume it. Indeed, the relationship between perceived quality and likelihood of purchase is a central finding in marketing. Oftentimes, consumers make these evaluations after learni...
Article
Full-text available
Inaction inertia is the tendency to forego an opportunity after missing a significantly better opportunity. We show that inaction inertia is rooted in reference dependence. This is consistent with prior work finding that smaller discounts are devalued and inertia is motivated by avoidance of loss. We further illuminate the process by showing that c...
Article
Full-text available
Consumers often spend time searching before making a purchasing decision to acquire knowledge about products. If the purchasing decision is delayed, recall of acquired knowledge is likely to be impaired. Because products in the marketplace are rarely described completely, consumers who take too long to decide may fail to notice the absence of infor...
Article
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It is surprisingly difficult to notice when important information is missing (omission neglect) and yet, social media, advertisements, and other forms of communication typically only include one-sided information or positive attributes and omit opposing views or negative attributes. Even though it is surprisingly difficult to overcome this natural...
Article
Although prior research has established a cognitive association between perceived financial resources and increased caloric intake, the underlying process is still largely unknown. To date, the psychological influence of financial cues on eating behavior has primarily been explained in terms of goal activation. Perceived scarcity of financial resou...
Article
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Misinformation on sustainability has become a widespread phenomenon in many different contexts. However, relatively little is known about several important determinants of belief in misinformation, and even less is known about how to debias that belief. The present research proposes and investigates a new effect, the half-truth effect, to explain h...
Article
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This article promotes the development of clinical consumer psychology; the study of how dysfunctional and maladaptive cognitive and behavioral processes interact with individuals’ consumer experience and behaviors. The article is organized around three primary discussion points: (a) A definition of clinical consumer psychology, supported by illustr...
Chapter
Research on omission neglect has shown that people often fail to detect the absence of important missing information, and this leads them to form strong judgments on the basis of weak evidence. Strong judgments are overly extreme with respect to the judgmental implications of the available evidence and are held with a high degree of confidence. Ove...
Article
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Consumer advocates and regulators champion the view that transparent labeling practices will help consumers make better decisions. However, it is unclear how unnatural nutritional claims (e.g., artificial ingredients, food additives, genetically modified organisms) affect perceptions of packaged food. Many researchers have cautioned that such label...
Article
This research was conducted to highlight the utility of considering clinical psychology concepts in judgment and decision research. Our overarching thesis is that the judgments and choices people make may often be influenced by clinically relevant phenomena, and that understanding these relationships can, in a reciprocal fashion, help advance our u...
Article
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A brand name’s linguistic characteristics convey brand qualities independent of the name’s denotative meaning. For instance, name length, sounds, and stress can signal masculine or feminine associations. This research examines the effects of such gender associations on three important brand outcomes: attitudes, choice, and performance. Across six s...
Article
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The use of special fonts in marketing communications may have more complex effects than expected. This study examines multiple effects of special fonts and proposes boundary conditions for the effects. Special fonts are perceived as more unique and difficult to read than regular fonts. Five experimental studies show that whereas the perception of u...
Article
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The use of technical language in marketing communications has more complex effects than what the previous research suggests. Three studies show that the effect of technical information on consumers’ evaluations of a product depends on whether their reactions to this information are based on (a) their difficulty of comprehending it or (b) their perc...
Article
Full-text available
The use of disfluency in marketing signage has more complex effects than what past research suggests. Time plays an important role in consumer information processing of signage presented disfluently. Three experimental studies suggest that the effects of disfluency on the awareness of missing information, purchase likelihood, and likelihood of futu...
Article
Purpose This paper aims to investigate the effect of chronological age on the likelihood to choose a service provider with technological machines versus humans in the context of services. Design/methodology/approach Two experimental studies were used to collect data. In both experiments, scripts were devised to depict a food ordering situation. Th...
Article
Although numerous dual‐process models have been brought to bear on the cognitive operations that underlie consumer judgment, they are typically limited in their ability to capture the processes that occur at different stages of cognitive activity and to specify how these processes interface. In many (if not most) cases, a mix of both automatic and...
Article
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Self-generated thought has been shown to have a significant impact on attitude change. Merely thinking about an attitude can result in more extreme attitudes. Although research in this area has investigated several moderating factors, most of the research looks at constraints that attenuate but do not reverse the effect (depolarization). The curren...
Article
Prior research suggests that disfluency leads to unfavorable product judgments and can be mitigated by debiasing techniques (i.e., explicit warnings about disfluency). We suggest a moderating role for the need for cognitive closure (NFCC), such that when information about a favorable brand is present, disfluency leads to less favorable judgments fo...
Article
Full-text available
Faded fonts on billboards and signage causes awareness of missing information. In this research, we highlight the importance of fonts in advertising and wayfinding and how it impacts sensitivity to missing information. Across two studies, we demonstrate that disfluency caused by faded fonts can reduce omission neglect. Study 1 establishes the basis...
Chapter
Consumers often form a wide variety of inferences about brands. Inferences are assumptions or conclusions that enable consumers to go beyond the given information. For example, consumers often form inferences about overall product quality based on a wide variety of heuristic cues (e.g., the price-quality heuristic). This chapter reviews social infe...
Book
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Brand touchpoints are used to reinforce the basic premise of branding, which is to distinguish brands from their competitors and remain memorable, ultimately keeping customers resolute in their allegiance. Information related through brand touchpoints increases brand familiarity, contributes to a brand’s value, improves attitudes towards a brand...
Article
Individuals are repeatedly exposed to new information over time, yet adjustment is typically insufficient and people are generally unaffected by this type of exposure. To circumvent this resistance to novel information, the current research posits that the mere timing by which the same information is differentially-revealed can prompt re-evaluation...
Article
In service encounters, the meaning inferred by a customer is a result of verbal and visual communication. This research focuses on how visual metaphorical communication in a service encounter can evoke the concept of power. We show that when representation of the service provider is at the bottom (versus top) of an image, the consumer's perception...
Article
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We all too often have to make decisions—from the mundane (e.g., what to eat for breakfast) to the complex (e.g., what to buy a loved one)—and yet there exists a multitude of strategies that allows us to make a decision. This work focuses on a subset of decision strategies that allows individuals to make decisions by bypassing the decision-making pr...
Article
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Trait positive affectivity (PA) is hypothesized to increase consumers' propensity to be brand loyal. Theories on affect, traits and brand loyalty are used to develop the conceptual framework for the hypotheses. Results from three studies show that consumers high on trait PA are more likely to (i) describe experienced brands favorably to others, (ii...
Article
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Some behavioral researchers occasionally wish to conduct a median split on a continuous variable and use the result in subsequent modeling to facilitate analytic ease and communication clarity. Traditionally, this practice of dichotomization has been criticized for the resulting loss of information and reduction in power. More recently, this practi...
Article
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In this rebuttal, we discuss the comments of Rucker, McShane, and Preacher (2015) and McClelland, Lynch, Irwin, Spiller, and Fitzsimons (2015). Both commentaries raise interesting points, and although both teams clearly put a lot of work into their papers, the bottom line is this: our research sets the record straight that median splits are perfect...
Article
Some behavioral researchers occasionally wish to conduct a median split on a continuous variable and use the result in subsequent modeling to facilitate analytic ease and communication clarity. Traditionally, this practice of dichotomization has been criticized for the resulting loss of information and reduction in power. More recently, this practi...
Article
In this rebuttal, we discuss the comments of Rucker, McShane, and Preacher (2015) and McClelland, Lynch, Irwin, Spiller, and Fitzsimons (2015). Both commentaries raise interesting points, and although both teams clearly put a lot of work into their papers, the bottom line is this: our research sets the record straight that median splits are perfect...
Chapter
Search committees recruiting junior faculty in marketing face increasingly complex tradeoffs among relevant dimensions; e.g., the perceived quality of the degree-granting institute, candidate’s publication records, language of undergraduate instruction, length of the program and previous work experience. Consequently, it is important for new Ph.D....
Article
Full-text available
Although merely repeating a product claim does not influence the objective validity of the claim, it often increases the subjective validity of the claim (the truth effect). Research notes that the truth effect plays an important role in health advertising. The present research investigates the moderating role of sensitivity to feelings of fluency...
Article
Full-text available
Significance Surprisingly little is known about the self-control consequences of individuals’ political ideologies, given the centrality of political ideology to people’s self-identity and the vitality of self-control to human functioning. This research addresses this unexplored gap by offering insight into the processes (freewill beliefs) and fact...
Article
When information is missing or unknown, consumers often form nutritional inferences based on perceived attribute variability across brands. Four experiments show that less favorable nutritional inferences are formed when perceived attribute variability is high as opposed to low. This effect occurs when two attributes differing in perceived variabil...
Article
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For the behavioral marketing scholar, experimentation and the analysis of variance are among the most important and frequently relied upon tools of the trade, and many useful texts exist to guide researchers on these topics. This monograph is intended to be a supplemental resource and a helpful guide for conducting three essential analytical techni...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Three experiments investigate the evaluative effect of revealing previously omitted information. In short, attributes were weighed more heavily when omitted-then-revealed (versus not omitted). Additionally, this revelation effect was mediated by changes in affect toward the product and bounded to those open (versus resistant) to change. The implica...
Article
Full-text available
Research has demonstrated that consumers are commonly insensitive to missing information and that this insensitivity can lead them to form strong beliefs and evaluations on the basis of weak evidence. A growing body of research has shown that sensitivity to omissions can be heightened and that this increased sensitivity results in more appropriate...
Conference Paper
Three studies demonstrate that the horns effect (i.e., a negative halo) influences product inferences associated with negative labels. Moreover, this effect is amplified by consumers low in critical thinking and attenuated by consumers who engage in diagnostic reasoning. These findings collectively demonstrate the bias of negative labels on consume...
Poster
Past research shows that perceived variety influences form-based organization of assortment. The research presented in this paper demonstrates that harmony in color has the same impact on consumption that a lack of structure or organization has.
Article
Some recent advertisements attempt to increase persuasiveness by directly asking consumers to imagine arguments supporting the ad's message. This research provides a critical test of the effectiveness of this imagine strategy, while also identifying specific situations in which this technique can be most effective in increasing persuasion. Three st...
Presentation
The health halo effect occurs when a consumer is presented with food with just one healthy attribute and assumes that the presented food offers healthy benefits on other unmentioned attributes. When information about an attribute is missing, consumers form nutritional inferences based on the variability of attribute values across brands. As predict...
Article
Full-text available
Negative acknowledgment is an impression management technique that uses the admission of an unfavorable quality to mitigate a negative response. Although the technique has been clearly demonstrated, the underlying process is not well understood. The current research identifies a key mediator and moderator while also demonstrating that the effect ex...
Article
The original marketing placebo effect study shows that high price increases consumers’ expectations and enhances behavioral performance (Shiv et al., 2005). We find that several nonprice variables (set size, scarcity, packaging, and taste) conceptually replicate this effect. Consumers hold naïve theories about the possible influence of many marketi...
Article
It is well known that the effectiveness of a brand extension strategy depends on the degree of perceived similarity between the parent brand and the extension and a host of important contextual variables. One such potential variable is the consumer's global versus local processing type. Using a converging operations approach, we show through three...
Article
Full-text available
Consumers often make inferences to fill in gaps in knowledge when they do not have complete information regarding products. Eight experiments show that consumers often have contradictory naive theories about the implications of common market phenomena and that they draw different conclusions as a function of which naive theory is primed, even when...
Article
Simonson et al. (forthcoming) propose a new theory of comparison selection that explains which particular alternatives will be considered in a wide variety of judgment and choice tasks. Comparison selection depends on the latitude of acceptance, comparison fluency, and the interaction between these factors. Importantly, these factors integrate a wi...
Article
Our chapter discusses the core tenets and applications of consumer psychology. Consumer psychology refers to the study of how individuals navigate judgments and decisions related to the consumption of products and services. The chapter covers basic principles of attention and memory, information processing, attitudes and persuasion, inferential pro...
Article
Full-text available
Celebrities are figures that people like a lot but know little about. Two experiments investigated how celebrity evaluations are affected by increased knowledge. In Experiment 1, heightened knowledge of the political orientation, faith, and social attitudes of two prominent actors led to less favorable evaluations and greater differentiation in the...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The marketing placebo effect is defined as "the influence of consumers' beliefs and expectations, shaped by experiences in their daily lives, on product judgments and services" (Shiv, Carmon, and Ariely 2005). Shiv, Carmon, and Ariely (2005) demonstrated that consumer expectations mediate the relationship between product beliefs and product efficac...
Presentation
Companies spend a considerable amount of time and money to test the information presented on product websites, printed media and in advertising. A key component of advertising is to highlight product benefits when new products are introduced in market. The truth effect is an established persuasive tactic used in advertising. However it has the disa...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The 18th academic conference hosted by the Design Management Institute (DMI) of Boston, Mass., attracted a greater number of papers than any previous conference. The event was intended to highlight the importance of the contribution of design to organisational effectiveness and success, particularly in the ways that it can improve the new product d...
Article
Full-text available
Prior research shows that the repetition of unfamiliar statements increases their subjective truthfulness. The present research shows that truth ratings can also be increased without repetition. Several different manipulations of low construal-level mind-sets increased the perceived validity of a wide variety of marketing claims across a broad spec...
Article
Full-text available
Prior research shows that the repetition of unfamiliar statements increases their subjective truthfulness. The present research shows that truth ratings can also be increased without repetition. Several different manipulations of low construal-level mind-sets increased the perceived validity of a wide variety of marketing claims across a broad spec...
Article
Full-text available
Judgements of the value or likelihood of a focal object or outcome have been shown to vary dramatically as a function of whether judgement is based on selective or comparative processing. This article explores the question of when selective versus comparative processing is likely, and demonstrates that as motivation and opportunity to process infor...
Poster
Truth ratings of ambiguous statements has shown to increase with repetition. Individuals who are exposed to repeated health claims are prone to believing those claims. Specifically, individuals who are high in Faith in Intuition and tend to place trust in the information they encounter, are more susceptible to believing health claims, if they are e...
Article
• media and consumer psychology; • consumer attention and interest - consumers, limited information processors that typically consider fewer than seven brands, when making a purchase decision; • product knowledge acquisition - selective hypothesis testing theory, judgment involving generating and testing hypotheses, or beliefs, interpretations, exp...
Article
Full-text available
When judging an object described by limited evidence, people often make judgments based on the evaluative implications of what is known and fail to adjust for what is unknown. Consequently, people tend to form extreme and confident judgments of an object even when little information is provided. The present study investigates the extent to which th...
Article
Full-text available
An experiment was conducted to explore the effects of strengthening the association between particular brands and a superordinate choice category on the likelihood of those brands being included in the consideration set, and chosen in a memory-based choice context. Results showed that a brand was more likely to be present in the consideration set,...
Article
Three experiments investigated the consequences of the presence of information that a manufacturing firm is profitable on consumers' judgments of the firm and the consequences for perceptions of advertising, products, and choice intention. When profitability is present in the advertising context, consumers form more favorable advertiser judgments,...
Article
This study investigates the effects of accuracy motivation and need to evaluate on online vs. memory-based attitude formation and attitude–behavior consistency. Results show that online attitude formation is more likely when accuracy motivation or the need to evaluate is high. However, cognitive load disrupts online attitude formation even when acc...
Article
The growing use of mass customization necessitates an understanding of consumers' evaluations of mass customization platforms. We hypothesize that consumers' objective and subjective knowledge of the customized product moderate the influence of idiosyncratically evaluated (i.e., personalizable) attributes on satisfaction with a customization platfo...
Chapter
Consumer psychologists utilize psychological concepts to understand, influence, and predict consumer behavior. Of these concepts, the study of attitude formation and change are of particular interest. Marketers use a wide variety of advertisements to attempt to persuade consumers to buy their products and services. These “ads” can be classified in...
Article
Full-text available
Most theories of relationship marketing emphasize the role of trust and commitment in affecting performance outcomes; however, a recent meta-analysis indicates that other mediating mechanisms are at work. Data from two studies—a laboratory experiment and a dyadic longitudinal field survey—demonstrate that gratitude also mediates the influence of a...
Article
Research on omission neglect has shown that people are insensitive to many different types of missing, unmentioned, or unknown information. However, prior research has not examined the role of omission neglect in non-gain and non-loss framing. The present research shows that gain/loss framing effects are greater than non-gain/non-loss framing effec...
Article
Full-text available
Consumers frequently make judgments and decisions based on limited or incomplete information. Secondhand sources of product information (e.g., information from advertising, promotion, or word-of-mouth communication) typically provide information about some product properties and characteristics (e.g., some attributes and benefits), but other proper...
Article
The disrupt-then-reframe (DTR) influence technique involves confusing consumers with a disruptive message and then reducing ambiguity by reframing the message. Experiment 1 shows that the DTR technique increases retail sales in a supermarket setting. Experiment 2 shows that the DTR technique increases the willingness to pay to join a student intere...
Article
Ambady, Krabbenhoft, Hogan, and Rosenthal (2006) demonstrated that “thin slices” or very brief observations of behavior are not only sufficient for drawing accurate automatic trait inferences, they actually improve accuracy, relative to inferences based on larger amounts of information. Too much information, too much knowledge, or too much analysis...
Article
Construal level theory (Trope & Liberman, 2003) suggests that construal level--or the degree of abstractness of mental representations--increases with temporal, spatial, or sensory distance. Three experiments show that the mere presence of a set of target brands at the time a choice is made encourages consumers to represent the brands in memory in...
Article
Individuals differing in the extent to which they enjoy thinking (Cacioppo & Petty, 1982) were exposed either to factual or to evaluative messages pertaining to a fictitious automobile. The results show that message appeal moderates the relationship between need for cognition and judgments about the message, whereas beliefs about the product attrib...
Article
Although prior research on influence has identified numerous techniques for increasing donation rates (see e. g., Cialdini, 1988), the problem of increasing donation sizes has been neglected. We conducted a field experiment in a telemarketing fundraising context to examine the effectiveness of three influence techniques for increasing the size of d...
Article
Two experiments investigated the effectiveness of two new procedures for improving judgment by increasing sensitivity to missing information. When consumers are insensitive to important missing information, overly extreme product evaluations are formed. However, when consumers are sensitive to important missing information, they form more moderate...
Article
This study examines, in an experimental setting, influencers of consumer bidding behaviour. We suggest that potential bidders are faced with two conflicting goals, i.e., approach and avoidance motives, and these conflicting motives may influence online bidding behaviour. Responses of 130 (n = 130) subjects to a total of 1300 auctions (ten auctions...
Article
Consumers often rely heavily on price as a predictor of quality and typically overestimate the strength of this relation. Furthermore, the inferences of quality they make on the basis of price can influence their actual purchase decisions. Selective hypothesis testing appears to underlie the effects of information load and format on price-quality i...
Article
Fault trees are used to organize potential causes of a problem to facilitate better judgments about potential problem solutions. However, fault trees can lead to biased judgments because decision makers tend to overestimate the likelihood of problem causes that are explicitly mentioned in the fault tree and underestimate the likelihood of problem c...
Article
Full-text available
The need to evaluate a single brand in isolation, without explicit comparisons to competitors, is ubiquitous in consumer judgment because competitors are often not readily apparent. Although consumers routinely make such judgments, in this paper we show that when a brand is judged in isolation, the judgment is often overly favorable. Moreover, we e...