Breaking Through the Clutter: Benefits of Advertisement Originality and Familiarity for Brand Attention and Memory

Rik Pieters (), Luk Warlop () and Michel Wedel ()
Additional contact information
Rik Pieters: Tilburg University, Faculty of Economics, Department of Marketing, P.O. Box 90153, 5000 LE Tilburg, The Netherlands
Luk Warlop: Catholic University of Leuven, Department of Applied Economics, Naamsestraat 69, B-3000 Leuven, Belgium
Michel Wedel: University of Groningen, Faculty of Economics, Department of Marketing and Marketing Research, P.O. Box 800, 9700 AV Groningen, The Netherlands, and University of Michigan, School of Business, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1234

Management Science, 2002, vol. 48, issue 6, 765-781

Abstract: Rising levels of advertising competition have made it increasingly difficult to attract and hold consumers' attention and to establish strong memory traces for the advertised brand. A common communication strategy to break through this competitive clutter is to increase ad originality. However, ad originality may have detrimental effects when consumers pay more attention to the ad at the expense of the advertised brand. Moreover, the positive effects of originality may quickly wane when the ad becomes familiar. Surprisingly, no research to date has examined such brand attention and memory effects of ad originality and familiarity. The current study aims to fill this void. We use a stochastic model of the influence that ad originality and familiarity have on consumers' eye fixations to the key elements of advertisements---brand, text, and pictorial---and how the information extracted during eye fixations promotes memory for the advertised brand. The model explicitly accounts for heterogeneity due to consumers and advertisements. Infrared eye tracking was applied to collect eye fixation data from 119 consumers who paged through two general-audience magazines containing 58 full-page advertisements. Memory for the advertised brands was assessed with an indirect memory task. The model was estimated using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. In support of our hypotheses, original advertisements drew more attention to the advertised brand. More importantly however, advertisements that were both original and familiar attracted the largest amount of attention to the advertised brand, which improved subsequent brand memory. In addition, original and familiar ads were found to promote brand memory directly. Implications of these findings for communication and media planning strategy are discussed.

Keywords: bayesian models; attention and brand memory; advertising effectiveness; originality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (69)

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