The role of frequency of experience with a product category and temporal orientation in self-referent advertising

Previous research conceptualized consumers' evaluations of self-referent advertisements as discrete episodic processing instances requiring the ad-hoc matching of ad and personal knowledge detail. The present research proposes that consumers with frequent (infrequent) experiences in a product category are primarily semantic (episodic) processors. Consequently, consumers with frequent experiences have an illusion of detail matching in retrospective self-referencing resulting from schema-driven memory intrusions induced by highly detailed ads. Alternatively, consumers with infrequent experiences exhibit intrusions in anticipatory self-referencing due to imagination inflation prompted by these ads. Two experiments demonstrate how consumer knowledge-based details interact with message details in retrospective and anticipatory self-referencing situations to alter ad evaluations depending on the extent of prior experience.