• What is the role of emotion and reason in developing and forming attitudes about products, brands, and advertisements?
• What are the implications for positioning brands in different types of product categories?

First, Chaudhuri cites Fishbein and Ajzen (1975) as holding that “attitudes consist of [a person’s] salient beliefs” (p 40). He then supports this with a hierarchy of effects attributed to Lavidge and Steiner (1961). That view shows a causal relationship between beliefs, attitude, and behavior such that beliefs play a causal role in the formation of an attitude and the attitude plays a causal role in the person’s actions or behavior. Moreover, the view suggests that the beliefs are a necessary condition of forming attitudes toward a product or campaign.

He then discusses much more plausible views by M.L. Ray (1973), Gorn (1982), and Mitchell and Olson (1981) that hold that beliefs aren’t necessary conditions for forming attitudes. Their research shows that a simple association of music or imagery with a brand is sufficient to cause a person to form an attitude toward that brand. But Chaudhuri doesn’t take that as the upshot of these views. Instead, Chaudhuri thinks that^[1]

the advertisement produces a favorable emotional response in the consumer (“I like Brand X”), which brings about beliefs about the brand (“Brand X is healthy”), leading to a purchase intention (“I intend to buy Brand X”). (p 41)

Chaudhuri then finishes up the first section by asserting that emotional messages are likely more important for what he calls “low involvement” products that don’t have many attributes or “parity” products that don’t have many differing attributes from their competitors. Consider bottled water. It doesn’t have many attributes. It has some hydrogen molecules, some oxygen molecules, and a plastic bottle. Moreover Dasani doesn’t differ much from Aquafina. So bottled water would be both a low involvement and parity product. Chaudhuri says that this type of product would benefit the most from emotional ads. He doesn’t offer any evidence for that; though it seems likely that those types of products would need to rely more on emotional advertising than rational advertising even if it doesn’t benefit those products more than others.

Next, Chaudhuri discusses an expanded model that he attributes to Perugini and Bagozzi (2001). This model looks something like this (p 43):

So where the previous model had a simpler beliefs to attitude to behavior causal chain, this one is a bit more detailed. The major distinction drawn here is between hedonic, or pleasurable, and utilitarian, or merely functional, products. Chaudhuri contends that only an affective brand attitude can result in a willingness to pay. However, he says that this could com from tangible brand beliefs. Notice the link between tangible brand beliefs and emotional brand evaluation. So, suppose a broom sweeps better than any other broom. Chaudhuri says this could lead to the following evaluation: this brand is unlike any other brand. Moreover, he says that evaluation is an emotional brand evaluation. Adding the evaluation step “allows us to better understand how beliefs become attitudes” (p 44).

To bolster his position, Chaudhuri relies on a Mandler’s (1975, 1982) theory on the structure of evaluation. According to Mandler, congruity between the evidence and a person’s schema of the world is what gives rise to evaluations, where a rational evaluation is one in which the evidence and a person’s schema are congruous. An emotional evaluation, on the other hand, is one in which the evidence and schema are incongruous and depending on the incongruity the evaluation could cause either negative or positive arousal. Chaudhuri says that this theory appears to be different than that of mere exposure (Moreland and Zajonc 1977, Zajonc 1980). To accommodate the latter in his model, Chaudhuri added familiarity as a possible causal precursor to affective brand attitude^[2].

Bringing it all together, the incongruity of the schema “is sufficient to cause autonomic nervous system activity and, in turn, results arousal” (p 47). Willingness to pay is just the willingness of a consumer to pay more for a product than he would for a competing product because of his affective attitude. That affective attitude is caused by the type of incongruity in the consumer’s schema and the evidence for the brand that results in a positive arousal.

Finally, Chaudhuri uses a study by Amaldoss and Jain (2005) to illustrate how different consumer schemas can result in different attitudes for the same evidence. Amaldoss and Jain showed that consumers who desired uniqueness were more likely to desire a product as the price increased. On the other hand, consumers who didn’t have a strong desire for uniqueness were more likely to desire a product less as the price increased. This is consistent with the schema theory of attitude formation. Given the same evidence, a price increase, consumers with a schema which included the desire to be unique formed a different attitude than those with a schema which didn’t include the desire to be unique.

1. ^[1] It’s not clear why Chaudhuri thinks that emotional responses have to be converted into beliefs before an attitude can be formed. Of course one reason might be to make the association views by Ray, et. al. consistent with the belief views from Fishbein, et. al. But why do that? ↩
2. ^[2] There’s an obvious concern with this ad hoc move that Chaudhuri never addresses. Namely, that beliefs are no longer a necessary condition for attitudes. Right after describing the ad hoc move Chaudhuri says “I submit that rational and emotional brand evaluation conform to the two types of evaluation…proposed by Mandler (1982)” leaving the reader confused about his position (p 45). ↩

• Chaudhuri, Arjun. (2006). Emotion and Reason in Consumer Behavior. Burlington, MA: Butterworth-Heinemann.

Next Chaudhuri explicates his own list of important characteristics of emotion. They are that (1) emotions can never be wrong, (2) emotions are global, (3) emotions are fundamental, (4) emotions are fast, catchy, and memorable, (5) emotions are permanent, and (6) emotions are independent of rational cognition.

What Chaudhuri is likely getting at with (1)^[1] is that persons can never be mistaken about their emotions. He is endorsing the infallibility of self-knowledge. Something like “[w]hen one carefully, attentively employs the mode of knowing unique to self-knowledge, one will not form a false belief about one’s own [mental] states” (Gertler). This is important because once an affect has been experienced, it seems more difficult to persuade someone that the affect was an inappropriate response than if they made some mistake in reasoning, i.e. lacked all the relevant evidence or made an error in the reasoning process. For instance, if an ad makes a consumer sad, he’s certainly not wrong that he’s feeling sad and convincing him he shouldn’t have been sad isn’t a straightforward task. After all that ad elicited that emotion in him; he didn’t make some judgment to feel sad about the content of the ad.

For claim (2)^[2] Chaudhuri cites the Ekman and Friesen (1975) study that demonstrated six universal emotions. He also infers from Buck’s claim that emotions are nonsymbolic that emotional marketing can be culture neutral. For example, the Coca-Cola polar bears and the Nike swoosh are understood in the US and in Japan. It seems like Chaudhuri considers emotions to be global and reason not global in the following way: symbolic communication is culture dependent and nonsymbolic communication is culture neutral^[3].

It’s not entirely clear what Chaudhuri means when he says, (3), emotions are fundamental. The literal interpretation is that emotions are a necessary part of any experience. However, he seems to be getting at something like emotions being an intuitive response that happens before ratiocination. That is, emotions obtain first and influence the reasoning about the experience we’ve had.

Chaudhuri’s characteristics of emotions (3), (4), (5), (6) share similar qualities. Emotions are fast, (4), and fundamental, (3). Emotions are catchy, memorable, (4), and permanent, (5). Emotions are permanent, (5), and can come apart from rational cognition, (6). Chaudhuri supports these characteristics with articles by Zajonc and others. According to (3), (4), (5), and (6) emotions are more favorable than rationality for a couple of reasons.

First, persuasion for, say, a product via reason can be overridden or undermined by reasons against using that product. For example, if a laundry detergent claimed that it cleaned clothes better because of some new chemical X and a competitor or news flash came out and said chemical X was bad for clothing then the reasons for the laundry detergent would be undermined. However, if the laundry detergent was preferred for some emotional reason, say a national hero endorsed the product, then even reasons against the product might not be sufficient to undermine the emotional appeal of using the product.

Another important reason is that the affect associated with the product can come apart from the reasons associated with the product. So, even after you’ve forgotten the benefits of buying organic you might still reach for the organic apples first because of the positive affect you’ve associated with buying organic products. Combined with the assertion that emotions are quicker to obtain and more memorable than reasons makes this a very powerful point for marketers.

1. ^[1] Chaudhuri emphasizes that emotions are true, but it seems like he mistakenly takes this to be a consequence of Buck’s more plausible claim that emotions are non-propositional and thus cannot be false. That is, emotions have no truth value. But notice that if they have no truth value, then they can be neither false nor true. ↩
2. ^[2] Of course he can’t mean simply that emotions are global in that all persons are capable of emotions since all persons are capable of reason as well and thus reason would be global in the same way that emotion is. Instead, Chaudhuri seems to mean that emotion is global in some distinct way and I take it that he means that certain emotions can be elicited using cultural-neutral communication. ↩
3. ^[3] Although he doesn’t make it explicit, his view must be that only certain type of emotions are global in this way since he holds that “prosocial feelings are not independent of cognition” (p. 32). Thus the global emotions would be basic emotions such as love, pride, and pity (p. 31). Eliciting an emotion such as national pride will likely be different for, say, China as compared to the United States. ↩

• Chaudhuri, Arjun. (2006). Emotion and Reason in Consumer Behavior. Burlington, MA: Butterworth-Heinemann.
• Gertler, Brie, “Self-Knowledge”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2011/entries/self-knowledge/>.

Next Chaudhuri wants to clarify what he means by emotion and reason. He does this by claiming that emotion and reason are two distinct but complimentary ways of gaining knowledge (p. 2). To buttress this claim he cites two well known figures. First, he quotes William James who said “I know the color blue when I see it, and the flavor of a pear when I taste it…but about the inner nature of these facts or what makes them what they are I can say nothing at all” (p. 22). This Chaudhuri takes to be knowledge by acquaintance or emotion. Reason, he says, is knowledge by description. To this point he references Bertrand Russell who said that his “knowledge of a table as a physical object…is not direct knowledge. Such as it is, it is obtained through acquaintance with the sense-data that make up the appearance of the table” (p. 73-74). From this Chaudhuri states, “[t]hus, the brain appears to involve two functionally different ways of knowing” (p. 3).^[1]

To further illustrate the distinction between emotion and reason, Chaudhuri discusses the communication of these concepts. He says that emotion is communicated spontaneously and reason is communicated symbolically^[2]. Importantly he says that spontaneous communication is possible without symbolic communication, but symbolic communication can never occur in the absence of spontaneous communication. So, when spontaneous communication occurs it activates the emotional part of the brain and may be accompanied by symbolic communication which activates the rational part of the brain. However, when symbolic communication occurs it must be accompanied by spontaneous communication and thus the emotional part of the brain is always activated, even when the form of communication is primarily rational.

Chaudhuri then draws out three forms of emotion based on research by Ross Buck. They are: Emotion I (EI) which consists of physiological responses, Emotion II (EII) which is spontaneous expressive behavior, and Emotion III (EIII) which is the subjective experience of the individual. I want to briefly focus on EIII. Chaudhuri states that this form is what he refers to as affect and that there are different types such as “joy, sorrow, fear, envy, anger, pride and so on” (p. 5). He then goes on to say that EIII is what he previously referred to as “knowledge by acquaintance”.^[3]

After discussing Buck’s forms of emotions, Chaudhuri talks about two different psychological views on emotion. First is the psychophysiological view. This is the view that emotion is the result of the visceral and skeletal response. The other view is the psychosocial view. In this view emotion is derived from the environment and the stimulus. In his words the psychophysiological view is that arousal is a sufficient and necessary condition for emotion, but in the psychosocial view arousal is necessary, but not sufficient.

Chaudhuri thinks both views might be right. Consider Bucks three types of emotions outlined earlier. It might be the case that the psychophysiological view refers to emotions of one form and the psychosocial view refers to emotions of another form. Chaudhuri also tries to reconcile the conflicting findings for each view by appealing to the knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description distinction.^[4]

Chaudhuri then devotes the remainder of the chapter to MacLean’s triune brain concept. This is the idea that our brain is literally made up of three regions: (1) a reptilian region remaining from our evolution from reptiles, (2) a paleomammalian region remaining from our evolution from early mammals, and (3) a neomammalian region.^[5],^[6]

1. ^[1] Notice that it’s not Russell’s view that knowledge by acquaintance is emotion and knowledge by description is reason. ↩
2. ^[2] This, along with some of the other views on emotion, Chaudhuri borrows heavily from Ross Buck’s work. ↩
3. ^[3] So “knowledge by acquaintance” consists of emotions such as joy, sorrow, fear, etc. Now recall the quote from William James that Chaudhuri took to be an example of this. “I know the color blue when I see it” (p. 22). This type of knowledge is an affect. But what sort of affect can it be? Is knowing the color blue something like joy? Sorrow? Fear? If not then it looks like we should throw out some part of what Chaudhuri has been developing up to this point and I contend that it should be the knowledge distinctions as conceptually identical as emotion and reason. It doesn’t strengthen the view. Rather it weakens the view because it introduces dubious claims. ↩
4. ^[4] It becomes clear at this point that Chaudhuri is attempting to reconcile the tension between all of the views he’s presenting. But to do so it looks like he’s going to have to present the views superficially. Upon a close look it’s clear that the views are just incompatible. ↩
5. ^[5] This view has been discredited. So, I won’t talk more about it. ↩
6. ^[6] Overall Chaudhuri is looking to fit his and the other researchers’ research into a comprehensive cognitive science or psychological view. Unfortunately, he strings together a handful of loosely related ideas to give the appearance of a comprehensive view, but it just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. He completely misses what the distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description is, he inconsistently tries to incorporate the distinction into Buck’s forms of emotion, he fails at reconciling the psychosocial and psychophysiological views in a coherent way, he frequently mentions the left-brain/right-brain distinction with no support for his use of it, and then he purports that the dubious triune brain theory has some explanatory power. ↩

• Chaudhuri, Arjun. (2006). Emotion and Reason in Consumer Behavior. Burlington, MA: Butterworth-Heinemann.
• James, Williams. (1890). The principles of psychology (Vol. 1). New York: Henry Holt.
• Russell, Bertrand. (1912). Problems of Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press.

In thinking about values of art we can draw on the analogy that the institution of art has to the institution of, say, baseball. Walton talks about the distinction between values intrinsic to the institution, such as winning the game, and values extrinsic to the institution, such as the entertainment society receives from watching a game. In the same way, Walton says, there are intrinsic values for art. For instance, a violinist playing a piece by Bach might be judged on how well she stays true to the original score. Extrinsic values in art might include something like the memories the Bach piece brings up in the listener and the pleasure that brings her. Walton takes the intrinsic values of the institution to be arbitrary. However, he says they are still tied in a very important way to aesthetic value.

Aesthetic value, Walton says, is a second-order value. It’s the appreciation of some value. For example, when the person listening to Bach being played enjoys the memories brought up by hearing it, she might also appreciate the ability for that piece of music to bring up those memories. These second-order values are aesthetic values. Walton says we can enjoy different activities or objects for whatever value they have without appreciating the ability of that activity or object to provide that value. For instance, we might enjoy walking along the beach without appreciating that walking along the beach provides that enjoyment. We might even enjoy listening to some piece of music without appreciating the artist’s ability to produce such enjoyable music. In both of these examples we are not noticing any aesthetic value, rather we are just noticing the first-order value.

According to Walton the second-order values, viz. aesthetic values, can come in different forms. Often admiration of an artist’s ability to create a piece with artistic value is the form that aesthetic value takes. But other than admiration, the second-order value might come by way of awe, wonder, or even negative attitudes such as shock or revolt.

Aesthetic value, then, is the appreciation ^[1] of an activity’s or object’s value. Walton admits this might not be consistent with the way aesthetic value has been used and that it might not be what critics have in mind when they consider something’s aesthetic value, but it seems to get at what aesthetic value is. It also seems to be capture many of the uses of aesthetic value.

1. ^[1] It’s important to note that the appreciation has to be appropriate. An object doesn’t have aesthetic value simply because anyone appreciates it for any reason. Instead, it has to be appreciated with propriety. ↩

• Walton, Kendall. (2008). Marvelous Images: On Values and the Arts. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.