Abstract
Repeatedly presented stimuli are affectively evaluated more positively than novel stimuli. This phenomenon, known as the mere exposure effect, is used in advertising. However, it is still unclear in which part of advertising images the mere exposure effect occurs. Given the recent suggestion that attention plays an important role in the mere exposure effect, it is possible that the mere exposure effect does not occur for commercial products when advertising images consist of a commercial product along with an attractive human model. To investigate this possibility, we manipulated the relationship between advertising images repeatedly presented in an exposure phase and images presented in a later rating phase. In the exposure phase, participants were repeatedly presented with advertising images consisting of a cosmetic product along with an attractive female model and were instructed to attend to a specified part of the image (Experiment 4) or were given no such an instruction (Experiments 1, 2, and 3). In the rating phase, participants were asked to evaluate their preference for complete advertising images (Experiment 1), the images of female models (Experiment 2), or images of products (Experiments 3 and 4) that were previously presented or not presented. The mere exposure effect was found for whole advertising images and images of female models. On the other hand, the mere exposure effect for the images of products was seen only when participants were explicitly encouraged to direct their attention to the product parts of the advertising image. That is, the results of this study suggest that the mere exposure effect does not always occur for every part of the repeated advertising images, and that attention would modulate the mere exposure effect for advertising images.
Highlights
Almost all commercial companies use advertising to increase sales of their products
We used a two-tailed paired t test to compare the exposed condition with the novel condition, which showed that the mean preference score was significantly higher in the exposed condition, compared to the novel condition, t(23) = 2.36, p = 0.03, dz = 0.48, indicating that the mere exposure effect occurred in Experiment 1
Participants were repeatedly presented with whole advertising images in the exposure phase and were asked to rate preference for the images of female models in the rating phase
Summary
Almost all commercial companies use advertising to increase sales of their products. According to one advertising model, the dual mediation hypothesis (MacKenzie et al, 1986), attitudes toward advertisements influence a customer’s intention to purchase through affecting both attitude toward brands and brand cognition. The Mere Exposure Effect for Advertising Images through advertising, such as evaluative conditioning (Stuart et al, 1987; Pleyers et al, 2007) and self-referencing (Lee et al, 2002) Another important mechanism in attitude change is the mere exposure effect (Zajonc, 1968), in which repeatedly presented stimuli are evaluated more positively than novel stimuli. The effect of selective attention on affective evaluation has been reported in studies of the distractor devaluation effect (Raymond et al, 2003), in which previously unattended objects are devalued relative to previously attended objects or novel objects The results of these studies contradict the naïve intuition that the mere exposure effect always occurs for every part of a previously exposed complex stimulus
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