The focus of my research is to analyse current trends in the Body Care industry, especially the phenomenon of "Food-Imitating-Products". Here, a household cleaner or a personal care product exhibits food attributes in order to enrich consumption experience. I try to find out why consumers purchase these items and why they are "buying" the obvious illusion that a shampoo or crème contains "real" apples, peaches or chocolate.
Did anyone already carry out implicit assumption tests on a similar product category?
I am currently using (together with my colleague Rohini Vijaygopal) an IAT to measure attitudes towards the OWNERS of a product, i.e., electric cars. My experience to date is as follows.
1. The procedure "works" in terms of generating clear differences between people with good or bad attitudes towards EVs.
2. An IAT is relatively easy to set up and people seem to be quite happy to complete the test - indeed they seem to enjoy it.
3. The more I use the IAT procedure the more I have misgivings about its underlying philosophy. By this I mean that when you set it up YOU the researcher has to decide the attitude that you are measuring. In the first applications of the IAT the pre-assumption was that people from a certain ethnic minority were seen by others as having certain very negative characteristics, e.g., that they were criminally inclined, violent, lazy, etc. In my own study I am having to pre-assume that EVs owners are seen by the general public as possessing certain traits, i.e., that they are somehow "radical" in orientation. Conversely I could have started out by assuming that EV owners had very different traits, e.g., wonderful environmental champions, technological pioneers, progressive individuals, and so on. But this would require a completely different IAT set-up.
I think the only answer to this conundrum is to state clearly that the particular trait chosen is the one that is the subject of the research and not alternatives.
Our work is still "work-in-progress" and so far all we have published is an Academy of Marketing conference working paper, which is attached.
I hope you find the above useful
Roger
Thank you Roger for your detailed answer! This really helped!
I am also thinking about configuring my own IAT. But one question remains: How did you get access to the cognilab software? Is there an easy, i.e. cheap, way to use the software for students?
Cheers, Anna
Also there are free of charge websites that offer IAT creation templates, e.g., "freeIAT" - I believe that cognilab is now charging a fee.
Roger
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