Bridging Aficionados’ Perceptual and Conceptual Knowledge to Enhance How They Learn from Experience

Abstract

The aficionado consumer is one who consumes and enjoys a hedonic product regularly but has failed to obtain product expertise from his/her many experiences. We conceptualize the aficionado as having asymmetric perceptual and conceptual knowledge and posit that when these two types of knowledge are bridged with a sensory consumption vocabulary, the aficionados are better able to learn from their experiences. In experiment 1, we find that providing aficionados a cross-modal learning tool (wine aroma wheel) during their tasting helps them strengthen their experiential memory and withstand influence from misleading marketing communications. We also find that when aficionados are presented with a misleading consumption vocabulary during their tasting, they more readily accept the marketing misinformation that results in memory distortion. In experiment 2, we find that accurate multisensory information delivered through either the wine aroma wheel or advertising can enhance how aficionados learn from their direct tasting experience.