An Experimental Study on the Effect of Brand and Brand Extension on Omission Neglect

Omission neglect is characterized by a lack of sensitivity to missing or unknown information. Prior research has shown that people often cannot identify an absence of important information, so that strong beliefs are formed based on little consistent empirical evidence. Most previous studies have examined the omission neglect phenomenon using only stimuli (e.g., product attributes) without the brand identification. The main purpose of this study is to understand the effects of brand on omission neglect. Three experiments were conducted involving 742 business administration students. The experiments' findings show that a recognized brand is more influential for the judgments of individuals with high levels of contextual knowledge (experts), compared with the judgments made by individuals with low levels of contextual knowledge (novices). A similar pattern of results is observed for highly similar brand extension evaluations. Discussion of results and both theoretical and managerial contributions are also presented.