This study examines how providing a product category name or a single brand name through advertising or other means affects consumers' recall of competing brands in a situation where they must choose one brand among several. The results of this study support the hypotheses that when the product category name is clearly known, providing the product category name as a retrieval cue facilitates recall of competing brand names, and that when the product category name is not clearly known, providing a brand name as a retrieval cue actually inhibits recall. However, in what could be considered the most realistic situation—when both cues are given simultaneously—it was expected that recall of competing brands would be strongly inhibited, but this hypothesis was only partially supported.