2000/06/01 by Margaret C. Campbell, Amna Kirmani · 9 citations
Business, Management and Accounting · Social Sciences · #Consumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and Identification #Customer Service Quality and Loyalty #Digital Marketing and Social Media
paper · doi:10.1086/314309
This article examines conditions that influence consumers' use of persuasion knowledge in evaluating an influence agent, such as a salesperson. We propose that persuasion knowledge is used when consumers draw an inference that a persuasion motive may underlie a salesperson's behavior. These motive inferences then affect perceptions of the salesperson. We propose that two factors, the accessibility of persuasion motives and the cognitive capacity of the consumer, affect whether consumers use persuasion knowledge. When an ulterior persuasion motive is highly accessible, both cognitively busy targets and unbusy observers use persuasion knowledge to evaluate the salesperson. When an ulterior motive is less accessible, cognitively busy targets are less likely to use persuasion knowledge, evaluating the salesperson as more sincere than are cognitively unbusy observers. Several experiments find support for the predictions.