Polysemous brand slogans have multiple meanings that may convey several product attributes. We build on extant research by suggesting that some consumers automatically access multiple meanings of a polysemous brand slogan, whereas others access only a single, immediately available meaning. A novel measure of automatic access to secondary meaning (the Secondary Meaning Access via the Automatic Route Test, or SMAART) is developed to capture this individual difference and show its consequences for consumer responses to polysemous slogans with unfavorable secondary meanings. The automatic-access account is further validated by employing the Implicit Association Test (Greenwald, McGhee, and Schwartz), suggesting that the unconscious impact of polysemous brand slogans can be more influential than intuitively expected.


*Claudiu V. Dimofte (dimofte@msb.edu) is assistant professor of marketing, Robert Emmett McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057. Richard F. Yalch (ryalch@u.washington.edu) is professor of marketing, University of Washington Business School, Box
353200, Seattle, WA 98195. The article is based on the first author’s doctoral dissertation at the University of Washington under the supervision of the second author. The authors acknowledge the helpful input of the editor, as sociate editor, and reviewers. In addition, the authors thank Forentiu Damian for help with software development and Anthony Greenwald and Ronald Goodstein for their helpful comments.

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Prior research has traced poor judgment quality to poor calibration. We suggest inconsistency to be another reason for poor judgment quality—utilizing different models on different occasions resulting in increased wandering in judgments. We demonstrate differing consistency in the utilization of models depending upon which variable is used as a cue and which is used as the criterion to be predicted. This results in differing correlations underlying judgments between the same two variables, an internally inconsistent pattern. We trace this to the utilization of lay causal models to make predictions but with the strength of the causal story moderating the consistency in use of the model.


*Arul Mishra is a doctoral candidate in marketing at the Tippie College of Business, University of Iowa, S252 PBB, Iowa City, IA 52242 (arul-mishra@uiowa.edu). Dhananjay Nayakankuppam is assistant professor of marketing at the Tippie College of Business, University of Iowa, W234 PBB, Iowa City, IA 52242 (dhananjay-nayakankuppam@uiowa.edu). Both authors contributed equally to the research, and order of authorship is alphabetical. The authors thank Joe Priester, Himanshu Mishra, and the participants of the JDM Brown Bag at the University of Iowa for their feedback at various stages of this project.

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The food system changes from being producer-driven to consumer-driven. Simultaneously, food systems are becoming increasingly confronted with fast-changing demands of consumers. These tendencies must be viewed in the context of the consumer society. Today’s food consumer behavior is both influenced by “traditional” concerns such as price or product quality, and by “modern” ones such as variety or process-oriented quality. Particularly the latter concerns are important to gain trust from consumers. To elaborate on this idea, four different consumer images are presented. These images contain various assumptions on food consumption. They are tested among a sample of consumers in the Netherlands.


*Agricultural Economics Research Institute (LEI), P.O. Box 29703, The Hague 2502 LS, The Netherlands, E-mail: h.j.m.hansman@lei.wag-ur.nl / j.c.dagevos@lei.wagur.nl

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We examine movie sequels as brand extensions of experiential goods. Study 1 reveals a reversal of the traditional categorization model such that dissimilar extensions are rated higher than similar extensions. This reversal is moderated by the name of the sequel; numbered sequels (Daredevil 2) are influenced by similarity more than named sequels (Daredevil: Taking It to the Streets). Study 2 reveals that the reversal arises because numbered sequels invoke a greater degree of assimilation with the parent movie, thereby increasing consumers’ level of satiation of experiential attributes. The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) provides external validity for our results (study 3).


*Sanjay Sood is assistant professor of marketing, UCLA Anderson School of Management, 110 Westwood Plaza, Suite B414, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1481 (sood@ucla.edu). Xavier Dreze is assistant professor of Marketing, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6340 (xdreze@wharton.upenn.edu). Correspondence: Sanjay Sood. The authors acknowledge the helpful input of the editor,associate editor, and reviewers. In addition, the authors thank the Entertainment and Media Management Institute of UCLA for helping fund the research.

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Our two-stage framework predicts that, during impression formation, individuals who hold ambivalent attitudes toward an issue are influenced by other sources regardless of their perceived reliability on the target issue. Less ambivalent individuals are presumed likely to check the reliability of the message’s source before accepting it. Experiment 1 finds that highly ambivalent participants do not differentiate between a more versus less reliable source when forming impressions of a political candidate, whereas less ambivalent participants do. Experiments 2 and 3 show that less ambivalent individuals’ attitudes can be influenced by less reliable sources if participants are unaware of this influence or if participants’ cognitive resources are curtailed.


*Martin R. Zemborain is assistant professor of marketing at IAE Management and Business School, Austral University, Mariano Acosta s/nro. Y Ruta Nac. 8 (1629) Pilar, Buenos Aires, Argentina (mzemborain@iae.edu.ar). Gita Venkataramani Johar is Meyer Feldberg Professor of Business at the
Graduate School of Business, Columbia University, 3022 Broadway, New York, NY 10027 (gvj1@columbia.edu). The authors contributed equally to this article and gratefully acknowledge helpful suggestions on earlier versions of the manuscript from the editor and two reviewers. This research was supported by the Columbia Business School research fund and was conducted while the first author was a doctoral student at Columbia University.

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Do consumers prefer auctions that allow them to place more precise bids to auctions that accept less precise bids? Can consumers accurately estimate their need for price-elicitation precision? This research addresses these questions by applying the notion of compatibility to the relationship between consumers’ bidding price uncertainty and the precision implied by the price-elicitation task. Data from four experiments show that when consumers are uncertain about the optimal bidding price, decision tasks requiring elicitation of precise bids lead to lower decision confidence, and vice versa. It is further shown that consumers display stronger preference for high-precision auctions, even though such auctions are associated with less confident pricing decisions.


*Alexander Chernev is associate professor of marketing at Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, 2001 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208 (ach@northwestern.edu). The author thanks Pierre Chandon, Ryan Hamilton, Vincent Nijs, the editor, the associate editor, and the three anonymous reviewers for their advice and constructive comments.

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In response to a call by Gangestad and Snyder (2000), this paper is a preliminary step in the investigation of status-oriented motivation in self-monitoring theory. A word association task with four student samples (US, UK, Quebec and Switzerland) shows that the nature of the link between prestige-related knowledge and self-monitoring level varies substantially between the four national samples. Future research should therefore take into account cultural factors when studying the role of prestige as a motivation behind self-monitoring. A series of research questions resulting from the study are discussed in the paper.

*The paper is forthcoming in the Society for Consumer Psychology 2003 Winter Conference Proceedings, New Orleans.

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The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is a collection of twelve stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, featuring his famous detective and illustrated by Sidney Paget.

These are the first of the Sherlock Holmes short stories, originally published as single stories in the Strand Magazine from July 1891 to June 1892. The book was published in England on October 14, 1892 by George Newnes Ltd and in a US Edition on October 15 by Harper. The initial combined print run was 14,500 copies.

The book was banned in the Soviet Union in 1929 for occultism, although the book shows few to no signs of such material. Later, the embargo was lifted.

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The novel, however, is far from simple hagiography, avoiding conventional narrative and pious language, Instead, it recreates the process by which Jean Sulivan discovered Strozzi's life and the meaning of his priesthood. Because the narrator is called "Sul" within the text, and the name Jean Sulivan appears on the cover, there is a mixture of genres, including a personal and intimate journal with a spiritual journey of its own. Indeed, the narrator has resisted Strozzi's influence on the book he is writing. Sulivan had started out to do a book about the reformed prostitute Elizabeth, anticipating a lurid underworld.

But Elizabeth kept speaking about Strozzi; from the outset Sulivan complains, "Strozzi stole my novel."

The psychological and spiritual journey that marks Sulivan's work is especially challenging for a Catholic writer who is aware of the rich but burdensome tradition of images and symbols that western Christianity has created. The art of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance each provide a representation of the spiritual ideals, religious institutions, and historical actualities of their age; how can a Catholic writer invent a form and language that will reflect our post-Christian age? In his 1964 novel, Mais il y a la mer (The Sea Remains, 1969. o.p.), Sulivan embodies the problem in Ramon Rimaz, a retired Spanish Cardinal living in a cottage next to the sea. Rimaz has, in a sense, been stripped of his vestments, his office, and his function. As a man he must confront his present existence (a housekeeper, a chance friendship with a boy on the beach, an encounter with a neighbor) and make sense of a life devoid of the imagery and authority of his history. The anonymous narrator finds in the image of nature, spec ifically the sea, a basis for a lyrical reconciliation with the immanent God.

In a sense Eternity, My Beloved might be seen as an historical text, a novel about the state of religious life in Paris before and after World War II, seen from the perspective of a writer living in the 60s, shortly before May 1968 produced the rebellion of the young against an entrenched bourgeois system of education. Mauriac's Woman of the Phraisees had already attacked the rigidity and hypocrisy of bourgeois religious life. Although Bernanos's Diary of a Country Priest is set in a poor rural parish, its description of the crisis of religion in France and its diary form obviously influenced Sulivan. (Like Bernanos, Sulivan writes in short units, from a few lines to several pages, 107 sections in 136 pages, arranged arbitrarily, without chronology, reflecting the fractured disorder of discovery.) Eternity, My Beloved, however, was written after Vatican II and reflects the renewed sense of hope that the Council engendered. With Latin no longer the universal language of the church, Sulivan attempts to find a new language for what the translator calls "that" -- the inexpressible, the mystical, the representation of the presence of God here and now - particularly in the character of Strozzi.

In this historical moment in the U.S., marked by a plethora of spiritual autobiographies, Eternity, My Beloved offers an unusual artistic experience and a challenging spiritual analysis. Whatever differences they are between the social and religious histories of France and the United States, we share the same post-Christian culture, at the heart of which, as Sulivan shows in this book, is the attitude toward sex. The epigraph, which provides the title, is from Nietzsche: "I have never found the woman by whom I would want to have a child, except this woman that I love, for I love you, eternity, my beloved." Strozzi is represented as a man beyond social and institutional constraints who faithfully maintains a spiritual presence among the marginalized members of his parish.

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Pride and Prejudice, first published on 28 January 1813, is the most famous of Jane Austen's novels and one of the first "romantic comedies" in the history of the novel. The book is Jane Austen's second published novel. Its manuscript was initially written between 1796 and 1797 in Steventon, Hampshire, where Austen lived in the rectory. Called First Impressions, it was never published under that title, and following revisions it was retitled Pride and Prejudice.

Background

The novel was originally titled First Impressions, and was written between October 1796 and August 1797. Jane Austen's father wrote to London bookseller Thomas Cadell on November 1, 1797, offering it for publication, but it was rejected unseen by return of post. The unpublished manuscript remained with Austen, and it was not until 1811 that the first of her novels would be published, Sense and Sensibility.

Buoyed by the release of her first published novel, Austen revised the manuscript for First Impressions, likely between 1811 and 1812.[1] She renamed the story Pride and Prejudice, an "apparent cliche" phrase of the times. In renaming the novel, Jane Austen probably had in mind the "sufferings and oppositions" summarized in the final chapter of Fanny Burney's Cecilia called "Pride and Prejudice". Literary scholar Robert Fox cautions against reading too much into the title when discerning the novel's themes since commercial factors may have played a role in its selection: "After the success of Sense and Sensibility, nothing would have seemed more natural than to bring out another novel of the same author using again the formula of antithesis and alliteration for the title". It is also possible that the novel's original title was altered to avoid confusion with other works. In the years between the completion of First Impressions and its revision into Pride and Prejudice, two other works had been published under that name: a novel by Margaret Holford and a comedy by Horace Smith.

Austen sold the copyright for the novel to Thomas Egerton of Whitehall in exchange for £110 (Austen had asked for £150). This proved a costly decision. Austen had published Sense and Sensibility on a commission basis, whereby she indemnified the publisher against any losses and received any profits, less costs and the publisher's commission. Unaware that Sense and Sensibility would sell out its edition, making her £140, she passed the copyright to Egerton for a one-off payment, meaning that all the risk - and all the profits - would be his. Jan Fergus has calculated that Egerton subsequently made around £450 from just the first two editions of the book.

Plot introduction

Mr and Mrs Bennet's five daughters are all unmarried, and when a rich, amiable young man moves into the neighbourhood, Mrs Bennet hopes to secure him as a husband for her beautiful, eldest daughter. The growing relationship, however, is sabotaged by the young man's haughty friend, who regards the match as unsuitable. When the friend in turn falls in love with the second Bennet daughter, his condescending offer is rejected with scorn and the connection seems over. However, events conspire to bring the various parties together despite the obstacles and misunderstandings that separate them. Pride on one side and prejudice on the other are slowly overcome and the characters come to a better knowledge of themselves and each other.

Plot summary

The novel opens with the line, "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." The arrival of such a man in the neighbourhood greatly excites Mrs Bennet, whose sole interest in life is to see her five daughters married. The wealthy young man in question, Mr Bingley, has leased the Netherfield estate and plans to settle for a while with his two sisters and his brother-in-law.

The newcomers excite great interest locally, particularly amongst mothers of marriageable daughters. They attend a public ball in the village of Meryton, where Mr Bingley shows himself to be amiable and unpretentious, dancing with many young ladies and showing his decided admiration for Jane Bennet. His friend Mr Darcy, however, makes himself unpopular despite his fine figure and income of £10,000 a year, being proud and disagreeable. Of Elizabeth Bennet he is heard to say, "She is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me." Following the ball, Jane is invited for an evening to Netherfield, but catches a bad cold and is forced to stay for some days. Elizabeth comes to nurse her, engaging Darcy's guarded attention and the not-so-guarded hostility of Miss Bingley, who appears to have in interest in Darcy herself.

Mr Collins, a cousin who will inherit the Bennet estate as Mr Bennet's nearest male relative, arrives for a visit. He is also "in want of a wife", and intends to marry one of his cousins, thus atoning for his position as entailed heir and healing the breach in the family. A pompous buffoon of a clergyman, he has been ordered by his imperious patroness, Lady Catherine de Bourgh (who is also Darcy's aunt), to find himself a suitable wife. Finding that Jane appears destined for Bingley he switches his sights to Elizabeth, who refuses him absolutely despite the threats and entreaties of her mother. Eventually, to Elizabeth's surprise, he is accepted by her friend Charlotte Lucas, who neither loves nor respects him, but wishes to escape the fate of becoming an old maid. Elizabeth does not regret the loss of her suitor, but is disppointed in Charlotte and unsure how happy she will be as Mrs. Collins.

For some time Meryton has been home to a regiment of soldiers, delighting the giddy, young Bennet sisters Kitty and Lydia. Elizabeth is introduced to a pleasant young officer, Mr Wickham, who tells her that he has known Mr Darcy from childhood, and has been cheated by him of a bequest by Darcy's late father. This reinforces Elizabeth's growing dislike of Darcy and she is relieved when he leaves the neighbourhood, although Bingley and his party also leave, dashing the hopes of Jane, who has fallen very much in love with him. However, Elizabeth encounters Darcy again on a visit to the newlywed Mr and Mrs Collins, as he arrives to visit Lady Catherine at Rosings Park, the estate to which Mr Collins's living is attached. She tolerates him, unaware of his growing admiration, and is astounded when he suddenly proposes to her. His offer is high-handed and condescending – he does so, he says, "against his own will" and in spite of her objectionable family. He is stunned and mortified to be rejected in no uncertain terms: Elizabeth tells him he is "the last man in the world whom [she] could ever be prevailed on to marry." She has recently learnt that it was Darcy who persuaded Mr Bingley to sever ties with Jane, increasing her dislike for him, and also cites his treatment of Wickham, his arrogance and his ungentlemanly conduct as reasons for her refusal.

The next day, Mr Darcy intercepts Elizabeth on her morning walk and hands her a letter before coldly taking his leave. In it, he justifies his actions over Bingley and Jane, and reveals the true nature of Wickham, who has misrepresented his treatment by Darcy, and, shockingly, even attempted to seduce and elope with Darcy's young and vulnerable sister. New light is shed on Mr Darcy's personality and Elizabeth begins to reconsider her opinion. Later, on holiday with her aunt and uncle, the Gardiners, Elizabeth is persuaded to tour Pemberley, Mr Darcy's estate, on the understanding that he is away. To her embarrassment he returns unexpectedly; however, his altered behaviour toward her – distinctly warmer than at their last meeting – and his polite and friendly manner toward her aunt and uncle, begin to persuade her that underneath his pride lies a true and generous nature. Her revised opinion is reinforced on meeting his sister Georgiana, a gentle, shy young girl upon whom he dotes.

Just as her relationship with Mr Darcy is beginning to thaw, Elizabeth receives the dreadful news that her headstrong younger sister Lydia has apparently eloped with Mr Wickham, who has resigned his commission to evade gambling debts. She returns home, believing that this scandal can only further disgust Darcy with the idea of a connection with her family, whatever he may feel for her personally. All is in chaos at home, particularly when it becomes apparent that Wickham has not married Lydia and the two are living together in London. Mr Gardiner apparently traces them and arranges the wedding, delighting the foolish Mrs Bennet. Only from a careless remark of Lydia's does Elizabeth discover that it was really Darcy who secretly intervened, buying Wickham's compliance and saving Lydia's reputation at great financial cost. This completes the reversal in Elizabeth's sentiments, and she regrets having turned down his earlier proposal of marriage.

Lady Catherine discovers Mr Darcy's feelings for Elizabeth, which threaten her long-cherished desire for him to marry her daughter. She pays Elizabeth an unannounced visit and brusquely tries to intimidate her into refusing such an engagement. Unfortunately for Lady Catherine, her visit only serves to consolidate Elizabeth's intentions. Furthermore, Lady Catherine later visits Mr Darcy, and relates the entire conversation to him – giving him the hope that if he proposes to Elizabeth again, she may accept him. After ensuring the rekindling of Mr Bingley and Jane Bennet's relationship, Mr Darcy and Elizabeth become engaged.

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