| Chapter 2: | Literature Review |
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Effects of Brand Familiarity
Brand familiarity is known to have a positive impact on advertising effectiveness. In the advertising literature, much evidence suggests that familiar brands enjoy cognitive and attitudinal advantage over unfamiliar brands (see, for example, Garner, 1985; Miniard, Bhatla, & Rose, 1990; Mitchell & Olson, 1981; Tellis, 1987). Consumers’ familiarity with certain brands may have been established through product use, packaging, advertising and other forms of marketing communication over time. Consumers may not only have memory for the brand name and the product attributes, they may also have certain attitudes toward the brand and the product.
Past research generally suggests that brand familiarity results in differential information processing and brand evaluation. Hoch and Deighton (1989), for example, argue that consumers tend to assimilate new information relevant to familiar brands into pre-existing knowledge structures more quickly. Tellis (1987) notes that information regarding familiar brands tends to be processed more efficiently with fewer cognitive demands. When familiarity is low, consumers’ prior knowledge of and attitudes toward unfamiliar brands may not be well formed. Therefore, consumers’ information processing and evaluations of ads may differ depending on the degree of brand familiarity. It is expected that fewer advertising exposures are required for familiar brands relative to unfamiliar brands to achieve the desired impact.
Tellis (1997) argues that while response to familiar brand ads may take a concave curve as a function of frequency, responses to unfamiliar brand ads may yield an inverted concave curve (see Figure 2.4). Tellis (1987, 1997) explains the advantages of familiar brands over unfamiliar brands in terms of the cognitive structure of consumers. First of all, consumers tend to interpret familiar brands in order to maintain cognitive consistency. Since people have a desire to maintain cognitive consistency, advertising relevant to consumers’ existing opinion and attitudes is