Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice
ISSN: 1069-6679 (Print) 1944-7175 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/mmtp20
Does Repeated AD Exposure Impair or Facilitate Recall of ADS with Similar Affective Valence? An Exploratory Study Hieu P. Nguyen , James M. Munch & Meryl P. Gardner To cite this article: Hieu P. Nguyen , James M. Munch & Meryl P. Gardner (2014) Does Repeated AD Exposure Impair or Facilitate Recall of ADS with Similar Affective Valence? An Exploratory Study, Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice, 22:1, 25-40 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.2753/MTP1069-6679220102
Published online: 05 Dec 2014.
Submit your article to this journal
Article views: 15
View related articles
View Crossmark data
Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=mmtp20 Download by: [University of Delaware]
Date: 05 April 2016, At: 20:13
Does Repeated Ad Exposure Impair or Facilitate Recall of Ads with Similar Affective Valence? An Exploratory Study Hieu P. Nguyen, James M. Munch, and Meryl P. Gardner
Downloaded by [University of Delaware] at 20:13 05 April 2016
In this study we examine how repetition of print advertisements can inhibit (rather than facilitate) brand recall in print advertisements that share similar affective valences. We find that reexposure to positively valenced advertisements impairs recall of brands in other positively valenced ads, but not recall of brands in negatively valenced ads and vice versa. Neutral ads provide boundary conditions for this effect: reexposure to neutrally valenced advertisements does not differentially affect recall of brands in neutral ads, and recall of brands in neutral ads is not affected by reexposure to positively or negatively valenced ads. Our findings indicate that repetition of a target ad may be able to impair recall of competitors’ brands in subsequent like-valenced ads in addition to having the well-understood benefit of enhancing recall of the advertised brand. We discuss implications of these findings for practitioners and academic researchers.
In today’s hypercompetitive environment, marketers promote their products and services in various advertising mediums on multiple occasions using multiple tactics in order to secure a place in the consumers’ evoked set (Grove, Carlson, and Dorsch 2007). Research in advertising has examined various factors that affect ad attitude and recall, including ad-brand congruency (Dahlen and Lange 2004), noise (Wu and Newell 2003), and figures of speech (Toncar and Munch 2003). One tactic that is often used as a tool for strengthening top-of-mind awareness and recall is repeated advertising exposure (e.g., Singh and Cole 1993). The effects of repeated target ad exposures (repetition effects) on attitude and recall in cluttered and uncluttered/ isolated contexts have been researched extensively in the marketing literature (e.g., Burke and Srull 1988; Campbell and Keller 2003; Cauberghe and Pelsmacker 2010; D’Souza and Rao 1995; Kirmani 1997; Lane 2000; Malaviya 2007; Malaviya, Meyers-Lev y, and Sternthal 1999). However, whether reexposure to target ads facilitates or inhibits recall of nontarget ads has not been well understood (for exceptions, see Alba and Chattopadhyay 1986; Lindsey and Hieu P. Nguyen (Ph.D., University of Texas at Arlington), Associate Professor of Marketing, College of Business Administration, California State University Long Beach, Long Beach, CA, hieu.
[email protected]. James M. Munch (Ph.D., Pennsylvania State University), Associate Dean, Raj Soin College of Business, Wright State University, Dayton, OH,
[email protected]. Meryl P. Gardner (Ph.D., Carnegie Mellon University), Associate Professor of Marketing, Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics, University of Delaware, Newark, DE, gardnerm@ udel.edu.
Krishnan 2007). For example, imagine that a magazine subscriber, Jessica, is reading a recent issue of Health magazine and sees quite a few print advertisements for a variety of products and services by various companies. The next day she is thumbing through Yoga Journal and sees some of the ads again. Does the repeated exposure to these ads help Jessica recall the other ads that she had seen the day before in Health? Might they help her recall some but forget others? Since research suggests that concepts in memory may be organized according to the emotions they evoke (Isen 1989; Stayman and Batra 1991), is it possible that the emotional valence of the ads may affect the pattern of recall? Despite the considerable amount of research exploring the effects of ad repetition on recall of the repeated ad, little is known about how repetition of one ad affects recall of other ads. It is important to explore this research topic as it is more common for consumers to be exposed to multiple advertisements than a single one in everyday settings (Malaviya, Meyers-Levy, and Sternthal 1999; Poncin and Derbaix 2009). Accordingly, this research investigates the effect of repetition of one ad on recall of other ads in the same pod, where a pod is a number of ads that are shown within a commercial break (Steinberg 2007) or analogously in one vehicle at one time. It is important to distinguish the focus of our research from the advertising interference effect. The interference effect occurs when viewers of an advertisement for a focal or target brand are also exposed to advertisements for competing brands within the same category (competitive The authors thank the editor and three reviewers for their helpful comments and support. Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice, vol. 22, no. 1 (winter 2014), pp. 25–39. © 2014 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved. Permissions: www.copyright.com ISSN 1069–6679 (print) / ISSN 1944–7175 (online) DOI: 10.2753/MTP1069-6679220102
Downloaded by [University of Delaware] at 20:13 05 April 2016
26 Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice interference) or other categories (noncompetitive interference) (Burke and Srull 1988). Notably, competitive/ noncompetitive interference has been investigated in the context of products in the same/different categories. Our research extends this line of work by looking at memory inhibition effects by exposure to ads of the same/different affective valences. Interference research involves one exposure to the target brand and subsequent exposure to nontarget brands (Danaher, Bonfrer, and Dhar 2008), whereas our research involves repeating the target ads to see how repetition affects recall of nontarget ads. In sum, researchers have shown that repetition effects enhance memory for the target ad (Anand and Sternthal 1990, Batra and Ray 1986), but to our knowledge there is no research to date that investigates how repetition of target ads influences memory for brands in ads that are seen at the same time. Our research addresses this gap by exploring three important questions: RQ1: Does repeated exposure to some ads impair or facilitate recall of brands in the remaining ads? RQ2: Are the effects affect specific? Does repeated exposure to positively (negatively) valenced ads (hereinafter referred to as positive or negative ads) impair only recall of brands in positive (negative) ads and not those in negative (positive) ads? RQ3: What are the boundary conditions? Does repeated exposure to neutrally valenced ads (hereinafter referred to as neutral ads) impair recall of only brands in neutral ads and not those in affectively valenced ads? We begin with a discussion of part-list cuing effects in the psychology and marketing literature, followed by the theoretical basis for the study (associative network and retrieval competition theories). We then provide the details of our study and conclude with a general discussion of our findings as well as limitations and implications for practitioners and researchers.
PART-LIST CUING INHIBITION IN MEMORY RESEARCH Bower’s (1981) associative network theory posits that activation of a central node in the memory structure sends signals to other nodes in the network through associative pointers, thereby activating these other memories. Nodes can be semantic (with straightforward meanings) or affective (with emotional meanings). By this account, exposure to some learned materials as cues should facilitate recall
of other materials that were encoded at the same time as the cues. However, findings in the part-list cuing literature show that this is not always the case. Part-list cuing inhibition refers to the observation that the presentation of a subset of previously learned items as retrieval cues often inhibits recall of the remaining uncued items (Aslan, Bauml, and Grundgeiger 2007). Slamecka (1968) shows that when people are asked to recall words they have studied earlier from a list, those given a subset of these words as cues recall a lower percentage of words than people who do not receive any cues. The inhibitory effect of part-list cuing has been found to be very robust in both episodic and semantic memory (Brown 1968), for both categorized (e.g., Roediger 1978) and noncategorized word lists (e.g., Roediger, Stellon, and Tulving 1977), and across various experimental settings. In psychology, researchers have found part-list cuing inhibition in different types of memory tests (Oswald, Serra, and Krishna 2006; Serra and Nairne 2000), across different age groups (Marsh et al. 2004; Zellner and Bauml 2005), and in false memory settings (Bauml and Kuhbandner 2003; Kimball and Bjork 2002; Reysen and Nairne 2002). The effects have been obtained when the cues are in the form of category exemplars (Slamecka 1968) and category names (Roediger 1978). Alba and Chattopadhyay (1985, 1986) extend part-list cuing research into the field of consumer behavior by exploring the inhibitory effects of exposure to a subset of brands on memory for other brands. They find that using a subset of brands as cues may either enhance or inhibit recall of the remaining brands depending on the knowledge level of consumers (Alba and Chattopadhyay 1985), and that increasing the salience of a single brand can significantly inhibit recall of competing brands (Alba and Chattopadhyay 1986). Lindsey and Krishnan (2007) study the effect of brand cues on target brand retrieval by individuals in collaborative (working together) versus noncollaborative (working in isolation) settings. They find that brand cues lead to greater inhibition of target brand retrieval in a collaborative setting than in a noncollaborative setting because participants in the collaborative setting were exposed to not only cues from external sources (e.g., television) but also cues verbalized by members of their triads during retrieval. Their findings highlight the effect of cue salience in part-list inhibition. Jin, Suh, and Donavan (2008) show that exposure two days prior to the Super Bowl to information about the ads planned for the game by four companies inhibits recall of nonpublicized brands that were also advertised during the game. Their results suggest that recall of salient items with more memory strength occurs at the expense of less salient items.
Downloaded by [University of Delaware] at 20:13 05 April 2016
Winter 2014 27 Several theories have attempted to explain the inhibitory effects of part-list cuing (Anderson, Bjork, and Bjork 1994; Basden, Basden, and Galloway 1977; Basden, Basden, and Wright 2003; Kimball and Bjork 2002; Raaijmakers and Shiffrin 1981; Roediger 1978; Roediger and Tulving 1974; Rundus 1973; Watkins 1975), but the dominant theoretical account is the retrieval competition hypothesis (Rundus 1973). It suggests that exposure to cued words strengthens their memory traces compared to those of uncued words. When individuals attempt to recall uncued items at test, the higher retrievability of the cued items decreases the probability of accessing uncued items directly (Bauml 2007; Nickerson 1984). In other words, part-list cuing leads to covert retrieval of cued items at the expense of uncued items (Bauml 2007). In summary, the literature on part-list cuing effects has found that exposure to part of a list as cues impairs recall of the remaining items on the list. However, the items on study lists in past research have been single words (names of states, brands, etc.) that are categorized by semantic rather than emotional content. This leaves unanswered the important question of whether findings in the literature will hold when study items are far more complicated than words and when they are related by the feelings rather than the thoughts they evoke, such as affective print advertisements. This gap in the literature has significant implications for theorists and marketing practitioners alike, and so warrants empirical research.
HYPOTHESIS DEVELOPMENT General Part-List Inhibition The retrieval competition hypothesis (Kimball and Bjork 2002; Rundus 1973) suggests that exposure to cued words strengthens their memory traces compared to those of uncued words. The hypothesis argues that when participants attempt to recall uncued items at test, the higher retrievability (due to re-exposure) of the cued items leads participants to covertly retrieve cued items before uncued items, resulting in a retrieval competition bias. This bias favors covert retrieval of the cued items at the expense of the uncued items. The hypothesis also assumes that each retrieval of the cued items reflects a failure to retrieve the uncued items and that the retrieval process stops after a critical number of failures (cessation rule). According to this rule (Rundus 1973), the search for a target item at a given level is terminated after the process has reached a predetermined number of successive items that have already been
recalled. The search process continues until a similar cessation criterion is reached at a higher level, at which point all search is terminated. Hence, competition bias can lower the recall probability for uncued items, thereby causing the detrimental effect of part-list cuing on recall for uncued items. Stated briefly, increasing the probability of recalling a cued item decreases the probability of accessing any other item at the same level on a given trial (Nickerson 1984). Although the research supporting this effect has involved lists of items, we believe the same reasoning will hold for recall of advertised brands after exposure to advertisements. Accordingly, we predict that when exposed to part of an original set of print advertisements as cues, cued participants will recall a lower percentage of brands in the remaining ads than uncued participants. H1 predicts that: Hypothesis 1: Compared to uncued participants, cued participants will recall a lower percentage of advertised brands in general.
Affect-Specific Part-List Inhibition Findings in the psycholog y literat ure (e.g., Marsh, McDermott, and Roediger 2004; Rundus 1973; Slamecka 1968) suggest that not only do cues inhibit recall of the remaining uncued items, this inhibitory effect is also categorical. Mueller and Watkins (1977) show that when words from a categorized study list are presented at recall along with a category name, they inhibit recall of items from the category only if they are names of instances from that category. The inhibitory effect is not found when the names are derived from categories not being tested. According to the associative network theory, items are organized hierarchically in memory, and items that emanate from a common node in the hierarchy can be accessed via that node. Therefore, by the retrieval competition account, the retrieval of some items from a category inhibits recall of other items that are closely associated in memory (i.e., those in the same category), but does not affect retrieval of items which are not closely associated in memory (i.e., those in different categories). The categorical effect of part-list cuing inhibition is particularly relevant to advertising researchers. Given that advertisements often use emotional appeals to trigger buying responses (Gardner 1985), and product categories tend to share common positioning strategies (i.e., beer advertising commonly relies on humorous emotional appeals), it is important to explore the effects of ad cues on retrieval of ads that either share or do not share the same affective
28 Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice valence. If exposure to ads with the same affective valence results in the formation of an affective-based category in memory, we would expect a categorical effect of part-list cuing such that re-exposure to a subset of positive (negative) ads would inhibit recall of other positive (negative) ads.
Downloaded by [University of Delaware] at 20:13 05 April 2016
Valence-Based Categorization Researchers provide evidence for the impact of mood and affect on memory organization and categorization. For example, research on mood congruent learning and the retrieval of mood congruent information from long-term memory for both positive and negative affective states shows that encoding or retrieval of material is enhanced when the affective valence of the material is congruent with ongoing mood (Blaney 1986; Bower 1981; Singer and Salovey 1988). Other researchers (Conway and Bekerian 1987; Shaver et al. 1987) show that emotions are represented in memory as a type of categorical knowledge. Keller (1991) argues that consumers may have strong memory associations with respect to an advertised brand’s overall valence, based on Isen’s suggestion that “not only do people remember how things made them feel, but . . . they often organize cognitive material in terms of how it made them feel” (1989, p. 99). Stayman and Batra (1991) provide strong evidence that brand names are associated in memory with the affect they evoke. Taken together, the findings from the psychology literature involving emotion-based categorization and those from the consumer psychology literature involving the organization of brands by emotion suggest that consumers spontaneously form subcategories of ads along the lines of affective valence. Shaver et al. (1987) suggest that individuals’ knowledge of emotions is structured hierarchically with two superordinate categories: positive and negative emotions, which are structured separately in memory. One way ads are linked to one another in memory is by their affective tone and the feelings they evoke. Following this reasoning, positive valence ads might be organized under a “feel-good ad” category, and negative valence ads might be organized under a “feel-bad ad” category. If this is so, then according to the retrieval competition hypothesis, the covert retrieval of positive ad cues (target ads) at the recall task would be expected to inhibit the retrieval of positive uncued (nontarget) ads due to the stronger trace of the ad cues. In short, we hypothesize: Hypothesis 2a: Positively cued participant s will recall a lower percentage of positive ads than uncued participants.
Positive ads are linked to one another in memory, but are not linked to negative or neutral ads. Therefore, a categorical retrieval competition account would predict that exposure to positive ad cues should not inhibit memory for brands in negative or neutral ads by retrieval competition. We predict that: Hypothesis 2b: Positively cued participants and uncued participants will recall a similar percentage of negative ads. Hypothesis 2c: Positively cued participants and uncued participants will recall a similar percentage of neutral ads. Regarding recall of brands in negative advertisements, a similar categorical inhibition is also predicted for participants in the negatively cued condition. We predict that exposure to negative ad cues should activate access to other negative ads in memory (but not positive or neutral ads). However, at the recall task, the covert retrieval of negative ad cues (target ads) should inhibit the retrieval of uncued negative (nontarget) ads, resulting in a lower percentage of brands in negative advertisements recalled by negatively cued participants compared to uncued participants. We hypothesize that: Hypothesis 3a: Negatively cued participants will recall a lower percentage of negative ads than uncued participants. Hypothesis 3b: Negatively cued participants and uncued participants will recall a similar percentage of positive ads. Hypothesis 3c: Negatively cued participants and uncued participants will recall a similar percentage of neutral ads. H2a, H2b, and H2c, and H3a, H3b, and H3c rely on categorization by affective valence to propose that positive cues inhibit recall of brands only in positive ads and negative cues inhibit recall of brands only in negative ads. This is consistent with findings in the literature that if cues are from one category, the part-list cuing effect is category specific (Mueller and Watkins 1977). In other words, cues from one category affect retrieval of noncued items from the same category, but do not affect recall of noncued items not in the same category. The case for neutral cues is somewhat different. In general, neutral valence is not a salient aspect of one’s experience. Research in psychology has shown that emotional stimuli are better remembered than neutral (nonemotional) stimuli (D’Argembeau and Van der Linden 2004; Waring and
Winter 2014 29 Kensinger 2009). By definition, neutral stimuli are those that do not elicit general or specific feelings, valence, or arousal (Waring and Kensinger 2009). Accordingly, it seems unlikely that neutral valence is used to categorize ads in memory, and we would not expect an affective categorization effect of part-list cuing. Therefore, in line with the general retrieval competition hypothesis, exposure to neutral ad cues should inhibit memory for all three types of ads (positive, negative, and neutral), resulting in lower recall of the brands in those ads. It is hypothesized that:
Downloaded by [University of Delaware] at 20:13 05 April 2016
Hypothesis 4a: Neutrally cued participant s will recall a lower percentage of positive ads than uncued participants. Hypothesis 4b: Neutrally cued participants will recall a lower percentage of negative ads than uncued participants. Hypothesis 4c: Neutrally cued participant s will recall a lower percentage of neutral ads than uncued participants.
METHODOLOGY Participants and Design One hundred forty-seven undergraduate students from a large Southwestern university participated in the experiment for partial course credit. The participants were randomly assigned to one of four cued conditions (no cue, positive cue, negative cue, neutral cue). Each participant viewed 26 ads (eight positive, eight negative, eight neutral, plus two buffer ads).
Materials One hundred twenty print ads representing three valence types (40 positive, 40 negative, 40 neutral) were selected from a pool of 250 print ads taken from popular U.S. magazines. Only full-page advertisements were used in this study because of their prevalent use in magazines and also to control for advertisement size (Harmon, Razzouk, and Stern 1983). To enhance internal validity, the ads in each of the emotionally valenced sets had three different positive or negative appeals. Although from a philosophy of science perspective, our findings can never be proven to be due to ad valence; by using three different appeals for each type of ad valence, we can be much more certain that our findings are due to ad valence, rather than the nature of the ad’s appeal.
To enhance external validity, we chose the specific appeals for each set of affectively valenced ads based on their popularity in U.S. magazines. For positive valence, ads that used happy, upbeat, or humorous appeals were selected. Aaker, Stayman, and Vezina’s (1988) cluster analysis of feelings elicited by advertising identifies clusters associated with “happy” and “humorous.” Burke and Edell (1989) find that upbeat feelings resulting from ads play an important role in attitude formation. For negative valence, ads with anxious, disgusted, or sad appeals were selected. All three appeals were associated with clusters of negative feelings elicited by advertising as identified by Aaker Stayman, and Vezina (1988). Ads that did not use emotional appeals were chosen as neutral ads. All 250 ads were rated by a panel of 10 undergraduate students whose demographics are similar to the experiment participants’. The panel members were briefed on the use of emotional appeals in print advertisements and then were instructed to rate the ads in terms of how the ads made them feel. Each ad was shown on a large drop-down screen for 10 seconds and the panel members rated the ad with 6 items (happy, upbeat, humorous and anxious, disgusted, sad) on a 7‑point Likert scale (1 = not at all; 7 = very much so). For each of the positive ads, the highest of the scores on the three positive dimensions (happy, upbeat, humorous) was selected as its positive score and the highest score of its negative dimensions (anxious, disgusted, sad) was selected as its negative score. The same procedure was applied to negative and neutral ads. Among the positive ads, the top 40 ads with the highest positive scores were selected. Similarly, the 40 ads with the highest negative scores were picked to represent negative ads. For neutral ads, the 40 ads with the lowest scores on both positive and negative dimensions were chosen (see Appendices A, B, and C for samples). The selected positive ads ranged from 7.0 to 4.8 on the positive dimension (1 = not at all; 7 = very much so). None of the positive ads scored higher than 2.5 on the negative dimension, indicating that the ads only had the singular intended positive valence. The selected negative ads ranged from 6.4 to 4.4 on the negative dimension. None of the negative ads scored higher than 2.4 on the positive dimension. Regarding the selected neutral ads, they ranged from 3.6 to 1.1 on the positive dimension, and 2.1 to 1.0 on the negative dimension, indicating that they were truly neutral, as they were not rated above average on either positive or negative dimension. All of the ads were screened so that no brand or organization’s name was featured in more than one ad across all valence types.
Downloaded by [University of Delaware] at 20:13 05 April 2016
30 Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice We checked the data for assumption violations and removed significant outliers prior to conducting analyses (Field 2005). A one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) comparing the mean positive ratings of the three groups of ads (positive, negative, neutral) indicates that there is a significant difference among the groups (F(2, 122) = 546.63, p
