Component brands have become prominent in industrial products. These smaller brands form relationships with the product brand - say, Intel and Dell - to support future innovation and insure quality for consumers. But, Professor George John asks, how do these relationships change industries?

New research by Assistant Professor Jane Ebert and co-authors Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson uses studies on forecasting and backcasting to show how consumers' method of predicting their future emotions can lead to very different purchase outcomes. Their article is in the October 2009 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research.

Professor Michael Houston studies field dependency, an aspect of information processing, and how attention to contextual information affects consumers' brand relationships in his latest work. How buyers form and store their brand memories influences their response to marketing, he writes in an April 2009 Journal of Marketing Research article.