| Chapter 2: | Literature Review |
or unfamiliar brand ads with differing competitive interference. They found that familiar brand ads not only produced higher memory of new product information, but also tended to be less affected by exposure to competitors’ ads. Snyder (1989) also reported that brand familiarity played an important role in consumers’ responses to advertising claims. Participants in her study thought that ad claims for familiar brands were more believable than those for unfamiliar brands.
In the web advertising context, Ward and Lee (2000) found that Internet users tend to react more favorably to familiar brands when shopping online. Dahlen (2001) also found that ads for familiar brands initially received more click-throughs than ads for unfamiliar brands. However, there was no significant difference in the click-through rate between familiar and unfamiliar brands after the third ad exposure. Specifically, the banner click-through rate for familiar brands increased in the initial exposures but declined after the third exposure whereas the click-through rate for the unfamiliar brands gradually increased. The results of this study are consistent with existing evidence which suggests that familiar brands tend to experience tedium faster than unfamiliar brands (Tellis, 1997; Mitchell & Olson, 1981).
Past studies on ad variation have employed a novel brand (Schumann, Petty, & Clemons, 1990; Motes, Hilton, & Fielden, 1992), a fictitious brand (Unnava, & Burnkrant, 1991), or an existing brand (Burnkrant, & Unnava, 1987). However, there has been little empirical evidence regarding the impact of brand familiarity. Compared with novel brands, familiar brands can provide a mnemonic advantage since people have pre-existing information associated with familiar brands through product use, packaging or other forms of marketing communications. For familiar brand ads, therefore, people can readily associate the new information in the ads with the information they have already acquired. However, when the brand is novel there may be no prior knowledge or memory trace specific to that brand since a new brand represents a completely new stimulus.