The Effect of Experiential Analogies on Consumer Perceptions and Attitudes

Consumers desire products that provide meaningful experiences. Therefore, a marketer's success often depends on familiarizing consumers with the unique experience a product offers. Marketers recognize the value in communicating about a product experience through analogy, but little research has investigated if and why these analogies are persuasive. By comparing a product to a familiar but disparate experience, an analogy has the power to focus consumers on the evaluative, emotional, and multisensory information associated with the product experience. This focus on subjective product experience enables the identification of base preference (i.e., a consumer's liking for the comparison experience) as an important moderator of analogical persuasiveness. In addition, the emotional knowledge transfer perspective applied in this research contributes to a better understanding of the role of emotional knowledge and experienced emotion in analogical thinking.