The Moderating Effect of Product Knowledge on the Learning and Organization of Product Information

This research examines how differences in the organization of brand information in memory between higher and lower knowledge consumers affects which brands are retrieved when consumers are provided with a usage situation. A spreading activation network model of memory is used to predict the results of an experiment where the usage situations were varied at encoding and repeated recall sessions. The results of the study indicate that lower knowledge consumers tend to learn only the brand information that is appropriate for a usage situation at encoding and do not organize brands by subcategory in memory. Consequently, lower knowledge consumers tend to retrieve the same set of brands regardless of the usage situation at retrieval. Alternatively, higher knowledge consumers learn brand information appropriate for different usage situations and organize this information by product subcategories. This allows higher knowledge consumers to retrieve the brands appropriate for the usage situation at retrieval, and to vary the set of retrieved brands as the usage situation changes. Copyright 2003 by the University of Chicago.