The moderating role of prior knowledge in schema-based product evaluation

Recent evidence suggests that a new product is evaluated more favorably when its attributes are moderately incongruent with an activated product category schema than when its attributes are either congruent or extremely incongruent with the schema. We extend this finding by showing that it obtains when consumers have limited knowledge about the product category. When consumers possess elaborate knowledge about the category, their evaluations are unaffected by the level of congruity but rather are influenced by their schema-based associations to specific product attributes. These findings are discussed in terms of current theorizing related to schema congruity and schema-based inferencing.