Abstract
Neuroimaging and behavioral studies have shown that brands convey meaning to consumers. To investigate the immediate reactions of the brain to brand logos, followed either by congruent or incongruent pictorial brand-related cues, can deepen understanding of the semantic processing of brands, and perhaps how consolidated the logo is in consumers’ minds. Participants were exposed to different brand-related image sets, that were either congruent (a match between brand-related images and brand logo) or incongruent (a mismatch between brand-related images and brand logo) while having their brain signals recorded. Event-related potential and EEG time–frequency domain features were extracted from the signals of the target image (brand logo). The results showed significantly larger N400 peak and relative theta power increase for incongruent compared to congruent logos, which could be attributed to an error-monitoring process. Thus, we argue that brands are encoded deeply in consumers’ minds, and cognitive processing of mismatched (vs matched) brand logos is more difficult, leading to greater error monitoring. The results were mostly consistent with previous studies investigating semantic incongruences in the linguistic field. Therefore, the error-monitoring process could be extended beyond linguistic forms, for example to images and brands.
Highlights
The immediate reaction of the brain to brand logos that are followed by congruent or incongruent pictorial brand cues can deepen our understanding of the semantic processing of brands
We evaluated the ongoing, neuronal, semantic processing of brand logos, using event-related potential (ERP) and Welchbased relative power analysis
Participants were exposed to 80 image sets, where the last image of each set included a brand logo preceded by a set of three images including brand-related cues
Summary
Neuroimaging and behavioral studies have shown that brands convey meaning to consumers. To investigate the immediate reactions of the brain to brand logos, followed either by congruent or incongruent pictorial brand-related cues, can deepen understanding of the semantic processing of brands, and perhaps how consolidated the logo is in consumers’ minds. The immediate reaction of the brain to brand logos that are followed by congruent or incongruent pictorial brand cues can deepen our understanding of the semantic processing of brands. Previous literature investigating semantic violations in sentence processing shows larger N400 amplitude, usually centro-parietally distributed, for words that are incongruent with a context, are infrequent, or have low cloze probability compared with congruent, frequent, or high cloze probability w ords[9,20–26]. The results showed a wide, spatially distributed N400 effect, though more pronounced over the frontal and frontal-central midline sites, where a larger amplitude was found for incongruent than congruent gestures
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