Abstract
Although the overall effect of creativity in advertising appears positive, the moderating effect of brand familiarity is unknown. On the basis of psychological frameworks, the authors developed an eye-tracking experiment using an electronic magazine format. Creative and control advertisements were compared, and brand familiarity was manipulated. The results demonstrate how brand familiarity moderates the effects of creativity. Creative advertising enhanced visual attention for advertisements, advertisement affect, and advertisement recognition in most situations. Highly creative advertising, however, led to less brand affect and brand recognition for familiar brands but more brand affect and brand recognition for unfamiliar brands.
MANAGEMENT SLANT
Highly creative advertising is critically important for less familiar brands.
Although highly creative advertising improves consumer attention to advertisements for highly familiar brands, brand affect may sometimes suffer.
If highly familiar brands do seek out highly creative advertisements, they should ensure that the advertisement implicatures are “on brand” to retain their attitudinal advantages with consumers.
INTRODUCTION
Researchers have made important strides in understanding what drives advertising effectiveness, and, not surprisingly, significant attention has been given to the effects of creativity. Although the case for how creative advertising benefits brands has been made frequently (e.g., Hurman, 2011), not everyone is convinced. Supporting the value of highly creative advertising is a meta-analysis of studies that examined consumer responses to creative advertisements (Rosengren, Eisend, Koslow, and Dahlén, 2020). Many managers, nevertheless, consider highly creative advertising inherently risky, and they hesitate to take that risk unless the brand is in trouble (West, 1999; West and Berthon, 1997).
Some marketing managers may resist highly creative work simply out of fear (Bilby, Koslow, and Sasser, 2023), but there may be other contingent effects that researchers should investigate. Highly creative advertisements may increase attention, but can they sometimes negatively influence brand affect (Abrand)? One paper proposed that highly creative advertising is not necessary for established brands (Kover, 2016), but another showed that when advertisements used many creative devices per second, consumers had less advertising attention and lower advertisement affect (Aadvertisement) (Bellman, Nencyz-Thiel, Kennedy, et al., 2019). Although creative devices per second may be a weak operationalization of creativity, previous researchers used a stronger one but were still puzzled by finding that highly creative advertisements led to less brand liking for familiar brands (Abedi and Koslow, 2022). Does brand familiarity alter how advertising creativity works?
Creativity heightens the attention to, affect toward, and memory for, unfamiliar brands’ advertising but frequently harms advertising responses for familiar brands.
The authors argue that high levels of brand familiarity moderate creativity’s effects because familiar brands already elicit greater attention, are known to consumers, and are subject to more extensive knowledge schemata (Kent and Allen, 1994; Mandler, 1981; Meyers-Levy and Tybout, 1989). The heightened attention that these brands receive suggests that they do not have to work as hard to gain attention and, therefore, have less to gain from highly creative advertising. To explore this possibility, the authors consider the psychology of attention from the perspective of executive functions.
Although creativity may heighten attention, the next question is: What does a creative advertisement do with that increased attention? An earlier paper suggested that when information is incongruent with what is already known, negative affect may or may not result, depending on a person’s ability to solve that incongruity (Mandler, 1981). If a familiar brand’s advertising content is not consistent with the brand’s accustomed position, consumers may find it harder to accommodate creative advertising content with their extensive, built-up knowledge schema of familiar brands, thus reducing affect and limiting the brand’s benefits from creativity. A familiar brand’s creative advertisement may perform well, even though its brand languishes.
In this article, the authors review the literature and develop hypotheses predicting consumer attention, advertisement affect and brand affect, and memory for creative advertising. An eye-tracking experiment was used. The level of creativity was operationalized by comparing eight creative award-winning advertisements with eight control advertisements. Brand familiarity was operationalized by attributing each advertisement to either a familiar or an unfamiliar brand. The authors defined high- and low-familiarity brands as either the most familiar brand in a category or a small niche brand. The results demonstrate that creativity heightens the attention to, affect toward, and memory for, unfamiliar brands’ advertising but frequently harms advertising responses for familiar brands.
LITERATURE REVIEW
Scholars have shown empirical support for creative advertising; for example, the originality component of advertising enhances attention (Pieters, Warlop, and Wadel, 2002). Creativity also increases brand awareness (Smith, Chen, and Yang, 2008), and creative slogans are easy to recall and recognize (Ang, Lee, and Leong, 2007). Creativity may work by postponing closure among consumers, leaving them more willing to entertain, and possibly accept, creative advertisement claims (Yang and Smith, 2009). This corresponds to the implicit theories that advertising creative professionals have with regard to how creativity works, in that one first needs to gain attention and then deliver a persuasive message (Kover, 1995; Nyilasy and Reid, 2009). Kover, Goldberg, and James (1995, p. 29) have argued that creativity “pushes the message into a viewers’ mind.”
What constitutes a persuasive message is dependent on how that message interacts with the viewer’s existing brand knowledge. Creative advertisements are unusual and unexpected, so they can be incongruent with brand knowledge. Advertising creativity, therefore, may be seen through a lens of advertisement incongruity. Highly creative advertising presents challenges because advertisement-brand incongruencies improve some responses but harm others (Dahlén, 2005; Dahlén, Rosengren, Törn, and Öhman, 2008). Consumers may have difficulty understanding incongruent advertisements, which undermines the positive influence of creativity on brand attitudes (Dahlén et al., 2008).
Most advertisement incongruency studies use forced exposure (e.g., Heckler and Childers, 1992), giving subjects little choice but to solve the incongruency. In a natural setting where consumers are not forced to solve incongruencies, different effects might occur. Consumers also want to fill in the gaps of their brand information (Mehta, Hoegg, and Chakravarti, 2011), but for the unusual implicatures that creative advertising suggests, this presents challenges.
A meta-analysis into advertising creativity’s effects suggests a net positive relationship between creativity and effectiveness (Rosengren et al., 2020). Creative advertisements work because of affect transfer, processing, and signaling mechanisms. Whether creativity’s effects are stronger for unfamiliar brands was also explored, but the interaction showed only marginally significant results. A key measure—attention—was omitted, however, as few scholars have directly measured the construct. To understand the attention process better, the authors of this article explored consumers’ cognitive processing using the executive functions framework.
Executive Functions
Executive functions are psychological processes that form “a family of top-down mental processes needed when you have to concentrate and pay attention” (Diamond, 2013, p. 136). This is reflective of the situation that consumers face when looking at media content. These functions sit in between automatic responses and higher level functions such as reasoning, problem solving, and planning (Diamond, 2013).
Consumers use one executive function, inhibition, when they are trying to concentrate and avoid interruptions (Diamond, 2013). A second executive function, working memory, reinforces attention when consumers are reading content or evaluating advertising material. A third executive function, cognitive flexibility, allows one to change perspectives to make sense of unusual stimuli such as creative advertisements. Creativity requires the cognitive flexibility function, as it alters processing goals, allowing longer advertisement-viewing durations and, potentially, more positive consumer responses.
Inhibition takes several forms, from inhibition control and self-control to selective attention and cognitive inhibition. To concentrate, one needs to inhibit thoughts and memories that may interfere with processing. This includes inhibiting attention to extraneous stimuli to focus selectively on only the stimuli on which one wants to focus. Inhibitions are closely aligned with processing goals to keep oneself mentally on track. In an advertising context, consumers generally concentrate on a media vehicle’s content rather than the advertisements. They tend to inhibit thinking about the advertisements so they can concentrate on content (Cho and Cheon, 2004; Hervet, Guérard, Tremblay, and Chtourou, 2011; Koslow and Stewart, 2022; Resnick and Albert, 2014).
Working memory entails holding information in one’s mind and using it in some way. Inhibition and working memory work closely together, although in many studies, it is hard to tell the two components apart, but they are different systems. A previous study considered the role of selective attention and working memory as it applies to vocal background music and showed that those with limited working memory have more difficulty selectively attending advertisements (Kang and Lakshmanan, 2017).
Cognitive flexibility relates to being able to take on different perspectives, either physically or interpersonally, or quickly switching between tasks. It allows one to “think outside the box.” In an advertising context, making sense of a creative advertisement requires this changing of perspective. Researchers have noted how cognitive flexibility allows some individuals to be more accepting of brand extensions presented in advertisements (Hagtvedt and Patrick, 2008).
Executive functions are a way to understand how consumers direct their attention when presented with advertisements (Koslow and Stewart, 2022). They relate to consumers’ motivation to process advertisements in that they are applied to help consumers fulfill their goals—usually the goal of concentrating on the story they’re reading in a magazine, but possibly also a lesser goal of learning about products and brands that might be valuable to them. Although there is research relating to executive functions on consumer processes, the moderating effect of brand familiarity on these processes in an advertising context has yet to be examined.
Inhibition takes several forms, from inhibition control and self-control to selective attention and cognitive inhibition.
Brand Familiarity and Inhibition
Brand familiarity is a unidimensional construct directly related to the time spent processing brand information, regardless of the type or content of processing involved (Baker, Hutchinson, Moore, and Nedungadi, 1986). The construct is context independent and is affected by advertising exposure, purchase behavior, and product consumption (Rosengren, Dahlén, and Modig, 2013). It is defined as the brand reflections that consumers accumulate as they focus on product-related experiences through advertising exposure, product usage, and purchase behavior (Alba and Hutchinson, 1987; Hoch and Deighton, 1989).
The concept also refers to consumer knowledge about the brand and is described in terms of what the consumer thinks about the brand (Flynn and Goldsmith, 1999). Brand familiarity serves as an umbrella term related to consumer expertise, prior knowledge, and strength of belief (Ha and Perks, 2005). Brand familiarity can be increased by brand experiences such as advertising exposure or product usage that improves consumer knowledge about the brand. Scholars have long known that brand familiarity is central to information processing and attention (Alba, Hutchinson, and Lynch, 1991). The authors conceptualize brand familiarity from a spreading activation perspective (Collins and Loftus, 1975); that is, high levels of brand familiarity that lead to a complex schema, or network, of semantic memory.
Although it may be that most advertising is inhibited, the question becomes what kinds of advertisements are less inhibited. As one researcher noted, relying on automatic systems and exercising little executive control does best for old tasks such as processing information about familiar brands that one knows well (Diamond, 2013). As consumer goals tie better into familiar brands, an executive functions perspective would suggest that consumers are less prone to inhibit advertising for familiar brands and will also give the advertisements more working memory capacity; thus, familiar brands should have a natural advantage of reduced inhibition.
If, however, one is advertising a less familiar brand, inhibition is more likely, so one strategy may be to make advertisements more creative, because such advertisements tend to draw and hold attention (Kover et al., 1995; Sasser and Koslow, 2008; Till and Baack, 2005). For new tasks such as understanding less familiar brands, invoking cognitive flexibility may be necessary to improve performance.
Brand Familiarity and Attention
The authors propose several patterns that should be observed for attention and the downstream psychological processes into which attention feeds. The authors focus on consumers’ attempts to keep control of their mental processing as they work through media content. Consumers must determine what the advertisements are, how to understand them, and whether to give them working memory. This process happens repeatedly in less than a few seconds when browsing through a magazine.
Attention could be directed toward the advertisement as a whole but also toward important elements within the advertisement. Consumers have to connect the advertisement with the sponsoring brand, so it is important that consumers attend to anything in the advertisement identifying the brand. This could be the brand name written in text or on the product, or brand logos or symbols presented elsewhere in the advertisement (Pieters, Wedel, and Batra, 2010). Attention to the advertisement, therefore, as well as attention to the brand-related elements will be important. The authors present the proposed model (See Figure 1), with specific hypotheses to follow concerning attention, affect, and memory.
Previous research into the effects of brand familiarity on attention to the advertisement as a whole suggests mixed effects. Some research shows that sometimes there is greater attention directed toward the total advertisement for familiar brands relative to unfamiliar brands, but sometimes there is no difference (Myers, Deitz, Hushmann, et al., 2020; Simmonds, Bellman, Kennedy, et al., 2020). These studies were conducted with advertisements that were not highly creative, so the pattern of results may occur because sometimes advertisements for familiar brands are less inhibited.
Attention to an advertisement as a whole is driven more by the advertisement’s unusual stimuli than by brand familiarity (Rosengren et al., 2020). When it comes to creative advertisements, they should lead to high levels of advertisement attention, because creativity appeals to cognitive flexibility, thus countering inhibition. The question, then, is whether attention will increase similarly for both familiar and unfamiliar brands. Consumers’ processing goals can differ, depending on whether the advertisement presents a familiar or an unfamiliar brand (Campbell and Keller, 2003). For an unfamiliar brand, the consumers’ goal will be learning and developing new associations (Sujan, 1985), which takes more time, whereas for familiar brands, the aim will be to update their current brand knowledge (Snyder and Stukas, 1999), which takes less. Creative advertisements for familiar brands, thus, may result in the opening of a consumer’s existing memory categories involving a faster confirmatory processing relative to the more extensive learning process required for an unfamiliar brand (Keller, 1991; MacKenzie and Speng, 1992). Thus:
H1a: Highly creative advertising increases attention to the total advertisement for unfamiliar brands.
H1b: Highly creative advertising does not increase attention to the total advertisement as much for familiar brands.
There is more complexity, however, regarding what elements within the advertisement get the increased attention. The authors argue that the positive influence of creativity should be greater for brand-related advertising elements for familiar brands than for unfamiliar ones. When advertisements are for familiar brands and not creative, consumers do not need to direct as much attention toward the brand advertising elements because they are already fluent with the brand schema (Myers et al., 2020). In this case, they recognize familiar brand names, logos, and symbols faster than unfamiliar ones. When advertisements are highly creative, however, consumers take longer to work through the advertisements’ meaning as they need to connect the advertisement with their complex and extensive brand schema or network (Lee and Schumann, 2004; Collins and Loftus, 1975).
When brands are unfamiliar, creativity also requires more time to process brand information, but given their less extensive brand schema or network, it will not take as long to work through their existing memory. Thus, creativity has a stronger effect on attention directed at brand-related advertising elements for familiar brands as opposed to an unfamiliar brand’s context. Thus:
H2a: Highly creative advertising increases attention to brand elements for unfamiliar brands.
H2b: Highly creative advertising increases attention to brand elements even more for familiar brands.
To compare H1 and H2, the first hypothesis addresses the issue that consumers “get the idea” behind creative advertisements for familiar brands faster than unfamiliar brands; hence, consumers do not need as much processing of the advertisement as a whole. When it comes to connecting the brand with the creative idea behind the advertisement, however (e.g., H2), that process takes longer for familiar brands and, thus, needs more attention on brand elements.
When advertisements are for familiar brands and not creative, consumers do not need to direct as much attention toward the brand advertising elements because they are already fluent with the brand schema.
Affect, Cognitive Flexibility, and Schema Congruity
Creative advertisements get attention, but what is the downstream influence on other factors, particularly advertisement affect and brand affect? A meta-analysis found that highly creative advertising is more liked—which is not a surprise—but the influence of advertisement creativity on brand affect is less clear (Rosengren et al., 2020). Advertisement affect does not lead directly to increased brand affect. Instead, when the psychological mechanisms for creativity are fully accounted for, the commonly observed positive relationship between advertisement affect and brand affect breaks down. This widely observed empirical relationship may simply be a function of a misspecified model of creativity. There is no a priori reason, therefore, to assume that liking a creative advertisement automatically translates into liking the brand: The two affects may actually go in different directions. To understand the influence of creativity on brand affect, one may approach this question using cognitive flexibility and schema congruity.
Although cognitive flexibility allows consumers to switch perspectives and view the brand through a new lens, it is hard to switch back and forth between them (Diamond, 2013). If a familiar brand has memory, attitude, or preference advantages, changing to a creative context means that consumers will find it harder to access those initial advantages. An earlier study confirmed that cognitive flexibility emphasizes the activation, retrieval, and integration of distant memory representations, thus de-emphasizing what is typically more accessible (Marko and Riečanský, 2018). For less familiar brands that have few memory advantages, their brand liking may well increase from the persuasive power of a creative advertisement. Familiar brands, however, may lose some of their extensive built-up advantages, as consumers find it hard to connect the new creative context with existing brand knowledge.
One can provide an explanation using schema congruity. One early researcher proposed a model connecting schema congruity and affect (Mandler, 1981), a diagram of which is provided by the authors (See Figure 2). The left side of the diagram shows the situation where one received information that is congruent with information one already has and the result is positive affect. As one moves to the right, the diagram depicts situations where information received is less congruent and one is less able to assimilate that information with what is already known. This can result in negative evaluations. In relation to brand affect, it may also be the case that, for unfamiliar brands, positive brand affect may also occur. This is because one knows little about the brand and, again, an alternative schema may be found.
In the case of familiar brands, however, the extensive schema that one has about a brand may lead one to accommodate that new, incongruous brand information with old information. If one is successful in combining the new information, either positive or negative affect may occur, but if one is not successful, negative affect may be directed toward the brand. Either way, it seems likely that aggregate brand affect will fall when advertisements are highly creative. Thus:
H3a: Highly creative advertising increases brand affect for unfamiliar brands.
H3b: Highly creative advertising decreases brand affect for familiar brands.
Creativity, Brand Familiarity, and Memory
Further downstream effects of attention should involve memory (Bellman et al., 2019), in terms of recall and recognition for both advertisements and brand. When executive functions are activated, so is working memory, which should, therefore, lead to better memory for both advertisements and brands. Memory effects from creative advertisements, therefore, should be fairly positive overall.
An issue arises, however, for memory for familiar brands because of the difficulty of going back and forth from the consumer’s extensive memory schema to the one implied by the new creative advertisement, which may somewhat negate a familiar brand’s memory advantages (Marko and Riečanský, 2012). A similar challenge is that creative advertisements are also more distinctive (Heiser, Sierra, and Torres, 2008), introducing a tradeoff: Distinctive stimuli are sometimes easier to recognize but harder to recall; thus, the net effect of creativity on advertisement and brand recall and recognition is not clear.
One may find a decline in memory outcomes for more familiar brands, although it may not be a large one. Overall, creativity’s influence on memory should be generally positive but possibly higher for recognition than for recall. Instead of making specific predictions, the authors offer two research questions:
RQ1: What is the effect of highly creative advertising on advertisement and brand recall for both familiar and unfamiliar brands?
RQ2: What is the effect of highly creative advertising on advertisement and brand recognition for both familiar and unfamiliar brands?
METHOD
The experiment utilized a 2 × 2 within-subject design. The independent factors were brand familiarity (high versus low) and advertising creativity (high versus control). The dependent variables were attention, advertisement affect and brand affect, advertisement and brand name recall, and advertisement and brand recognition. Each participant viewed a mock-up of an online magazine, called Rosna, on a Tobii eye-tracking machine and was asked to go through one version of the digital magazine in one session and then answer the related questionnaire in an immediately following session.
Respondents
The in-person nature of eye-tracking equipment meant that the authors could not use an online panel; therefore, they advertised locally for unpaid volunteers for a 30-minute experiment. Given that the residential area around the university predominately consisted of students, many volunteered, so 79.9 percent of the respondents were undergraduate business students. The authors tested whether undergraduate student status influenced the results: It did not. They made sure, nonetheless, that all product categories used were ones commonly purchased by young consumers.
The authors sought to have about 20 respondents per magazine version, and they collected data on 187 subjects who were randomly assigned to treatments. Of these, six were excluded because they could not be calibrated on the eye-tracking equipment, and 25 more also were excluded because they were not native English speakers. Another seven were excluded because their total time looking at the online magazine was less than 2.4 minutes, the amount of time it would take to spend an average of six seconds on each of the 24 two-page spreads in the magazine. The authors report on the analysis of 149 respondents, or 18.6 per magazine version. Females made up 47.7 percent of this group, and the average age was 20.
Procedures
Subjects participated in person and were told that the study explored the relationships among magazine format, reading style, and media attitudes. The procedure started by introducing each participant to the eye-tracking equipment and calibrating them. Any subjects who could not be calibrated were thanked and dismissed. Subjects were then asked to look at the magazine as they would do while waiting for the doctor or public transport. They were also told they had 15 minutes to view the magazine but could spend less or more time if they wanted to and could freely move forward or backward at their own pace. Subjects averaged nine minutes, 13 seconds looking at the magazine in total, with one minute, 52 seconds fixated on advertisements. All participants viewed the magazine for at least two and a half minutes; the longest viewing was 24 minutes.
Subjects participated in person and were told that the study explored the relationships among magazine format, reading style, and media attitudes.
Subjects were always shown a two-page spread and usually a page of text on one side and an advertisement on the other. Occasionally, two advertisements faced one another, but this was incorporated into the counterbalanced design, along with right- and left-hand positions for the advertisements. After completing the eye-tracking portion of the study, respondents were moved to a separate room, where they were given a paper questionnaire. About seven minutes passed between viewing the magazine and filling out the questionnaire. Completing the questionnaire took about 10 minutes, and no subject spent less than five minutes on the task.
Subjects were first asked to recall any advertisements or brands they remembered, and these were recorded and coded. Then they were given a series of probes for categories and brands and asked if they could remember any. Finally, they received a recognition task for all 24 advertisements. For the prompted recall and recognition tasks, they were also asked about an additional eight distractor categories, regarding brands and advertisements that were never in the online magazine, to test for false recognition, which was minimal. Only 2.9 percent of the time did respondents claim recognition for advertisements that were never in the online magazine.
Finally, subjects were asked about their brand affect and advertisement affect for 16 target brands/advertisements and 16 distractor brands/advertisements. Two doubly concrete single-item scales were used that measured responses to the statements “I like this brand” and “I like this advertisement” (Bergkvist and Rossiter, 2007). Each used a 7-point scale ranging from “strongly disagree” (1) to “strongly agree” (7). The final question was a single-item manipulation check on creativity that was worded: “This advertisement is creative.” The same 7-point response scale was used.
Eye-Tracking Measures
Two attention measures were recorded using eye tracking. The first measure—the total time spent looking directly at the advertisement—was called the “fixation duration.” The whole advertisement was defined as an “area of interest” in eye-tracking parlance; thus, whenever the consumer fixated anywhere in the advertisement, the total time was recorded. The second measure was the length of time respondents spent looking directly at the brand-related elements of the advertisement. This measure defined the areas of interest as being the places within the advertisement where the brand name was printed or where brand symbols were shown. This could be in the headline, in text, on the package, or elsewhere. The Tobii system measures many other aspects of eye movements, but the authors found that these two summarized the data well. For both measures, they took the natural log of the fixation times; hence, their attention measures were total fixation duration toward the advertisement, [log(TFDadvertisement)], and total fixation duration toward the brand, [log(TFDbrand)].
Manipulations
To identify high- and low-familiarity brands, the researchers used a pretest to examine 36 students at a medium-sized public university in New Zealand. Students received a questionnaire that asked them to list any brand names they could remember related to specific target product categories. The highest level of first mentions was taken in each category; in all cases, the brand was the market share leader in the local area. Another brand was chosen as the low-familiarity option because it was the least mentioned but still operated in the local area. These were much smaller brands in comparison with the large ones.
The 16 product categories used were as follows: cars, retail supermarkets, mobile phone services, Internet services, newspapers, magazines, cooking television programs, travel agencies, computers, pasta, coffee, dress shoes, juice drinks, ice cream, toothpaste, and facial tissues. The first eight advertisements were always the high-creativity advertisements, whereas the last eight were always the control advertisements (See Web Appendix).
The creative advertisements were all multiple award winners from several creativity competitions: Art Directors Club of Europe (ADCE), Campaign Press, Cannes Lions, Clio, Creative Circle, D&AD, and OneShow. To be included, advertisements had to gain at least a bronze medal in three competitions and a silver medal in one (or equivalent awards). Six of the campaigns had multiple gold awards, one had a single gold, and only one had silver for its highest rank (the television program advertisement). An additional constraint was that a copy of the print advertisement needed to be available to the researchers with its text in English. The control and distractor advertisements were selected at random from English-language overseas magazines for brands not available in the test location.
Twenty-four full-page advertisements were interspersed in the online magazine, with eight advertisements being creative-award winners, eight control advertisements, and eight distractors. There were eight magazine versions; in each, eight of the creative advertisements were attributed to high-familiarity brands and eight to low-familiarity ones. All subjects saw all creative advertisements and all control advertisements.
What differed between the magazine versions, however, was the brand to which the advertisement was attributed, either a familiar or an unfamiliar brand. All respondents saw the “diesel car” advertisement, for example, and for half of the respondents, it was attributed to the familiar brand, Toyota (See Web Appendix). For the other half, the advertisement was attributed to an unfamiliar brand, Volkswagen. Distractor advertisements were unrelated to the manipulations and always were attributed to the same brand. These were included to identify baseline responses, but such controls proved unnecessary. A hyper-Greco-Latin square design was used to counterbalance the design for both order and the treatments.
A manipulation check confirmed that respondents viewed the advertisements that were creative-award winners as more creative than the control advertisements. The average creativity perception of the eight creative advertisements was 4.97, and the average for the eight control advertisements was 3.34. With a standard deviation of .038, this difference was significant at p < .0001. Also, the average of each creative advertisement was higher than the average of each control advertisement. The authors thus have detailed all measures, conditions, and data exclusions in the experiment.
RESULTS
The attention and affect variables were predicted using a generalized linear model in SAS. Logistic regression was used to predict the memory-oriented variables of advertisement recall, brand recall, advertisement recognition, and brand recognition. Final models were selected by a forward stepwise procedure that tested all one-way variables and their two-way interactions. When a significant two-way interaction was included, so were the corresponding one-way effects, regardless of significance level. The significance level cutoff used was p = .05.
Attention
Total Fixation Duration toward the Advertisement [log(TFDadvertisement)]. In the final model for log(TFDadvertisement), R2 is 56.8 percent and includes a two-way interaction between advertising creativity and brand familiarity. Also included was a separate mean for each individual to estimate individual differences, plus the interaction between these and creativity. The results for log(TFDadvertisement) show a one-way effect of creativity (p = .0023; See Table 1). The one-way effect of brand familiarity itself is not statistically significant (but it was involved with a significant interaction noted later). There were significant differences among the advertisements themselves (p < .0001), but these differences were nested within the creativity treatment. The authors present the least square means for the total fixation duration for the 16 advertisements, with the control advertisements on the left and the creative-award winners on the right (See Figure 3). There was also a significant interaction between individual differences and creativity (p = .0008), which indicates that the mean level effects of creativity differed from subject to subject.
The two-way interaction between advertising creativity and brand familiarity was significant (p < .0001). Advertising creativity increased the TFD of the advertisement for unfamiliar brands, rising from 4.39 seconds for noncreative advertisements to 5.23 seconds for creative advertisements (See Figure 4). This confirms H1a.
Figure 4 also shows that advertising creativity has a nonsignificant influence on familiar brands. The log(TFDadvertisement) was largely unchanged, going from 4.85 seconds when familiar brands used uncreative advertisements to 4.75 seconds when familiar brands used creative advertisements. Creativity appears to elicit more attention to the advertisements of less familiar brands, thus supporting H1b.
Total Fixation Duration toward the Brand [log(TFDbrand)]. In the final model for log(TFDbrand), R2 = 52.6 percent. Advertising creativity showed a significant one-way effect (p < .0001), but brand familiarity showed a nonsignificant one-way effect (p = .894). There were differences among the advertisements (p < .0001), nested within the creativity treatment. The significant interaction between individual differences and creativity means that creativity’s effect differed from subject to subject (p = .0031).
Table 1 shows that advertising creativity interacts with brand familiarity (p = .0093). Creativity increased brand fixation for unfamiliar brands, rising from 1.56 seconds for the control advertisements to 2.06 seconds for the creative advertisements, confirming H2a (See Figure 5). When brands were familiar, fixation increased at a faster rate, rising from 1.45 to 2.21 seconds; thus, H2b is also supported. Note that brand fixation for control advertisements did not differ between the familiar or unfamiliar brands’ treatments, and neither did the brand fixation for the creative advertisements. Only the slopes in Figure 5 were significantly different.
Taking in tandem these two fixation results for the advertisement and brand, creativity increased advertisement attention for unfamiliar brands but increased brand attention for familiar brands. Because there was no increase in advertisement attention for familiar brands’ advertisements, the increased attention to brand elements appears to have crowded out attention for the rest of the advertisement. For familiar brands, attention to the non-brand advertisement elements decreased by around 0.8 seconds.
Advertisement Affect and Brand Affect
Advertisement Affect. For the final model for advertisement affect, R2 = 39.8 percent. Significant one-way effects were observed for advertisement differences (nested within creativity), brand familiarity, and respondent individual differences, as well as log(TFDadvertisement) and log(TFDbrand). The authors also present data on a significant interaction (See Table 2). Brand familiarity improved advertisement affect, rising from 4.25 (when brands were unfamiliar) to 4.53 (when brands were familiar). For the advertisement’s log(TFDadvertisement), β = .293; for log(TFDbrand), β = .266. Thus, fixation toward an advertisement or brand improved advertisement affect. An interaction involving creativity and individual differences shows that the effects of creativity differed among respondents.
Brand Affect. For brand affect, R2 = 34.2 percent. The interaction between creativity and brand familiarity was significant (p < .0001); so were the one-way effects of advertisements, brand familiarity, creativity, and individual differences.
The authors provide details on the interaction (See Figure 6). For unfamiliar brands, creative advertising increased brand affect, moving from 3.96 (on a 7-point scale) in the case of control advertisements to 4.16 for creative ones, confirming H3a. Control advertisements for familiar brands, however, had an brand affect of 5.17 that fell to 4.74 when creative advertisements were used, supporting H3b. Brand affect was still higher for familiar brands relative to unfamiliar ones, but the advantage of familiar brands substantially narrowed for creative advertisements.
There are contrasting effects on advertisement affect and brand affect such that creativity did not interact with brand familiarity to predict Aadvertisement—creative advertisements are always more liked—but the two constructs interacted to predict brand affect. Creative advertisements for familiar brands, however, led to less brand affect.
Memory: Recall
Advertisement Recall. Logistic regression models estimated memory effects as indicated by the authors (See Table 3). Advertisements were correctly recalled 24.0 percent of the time. The results show one-way significant effects (p < .0001) for the advertisement’s log(TFDadvertisement), advertisement differences (nested within creativity), and brand familiarity. Respondents recalled advertisements of familiar brands more than those of unfamiliar brands. Creativity was not significant.
Brand Recall. Brands were correctly recalled 16.4 percent of the time. The results in Table 3 show one-way significant effects (p < .0001) for log(TFDadvertisement), brand familiarity, and advertisements nested within the creativity treatment. The effect of creativity was, again, not significant. There is, however, a significant two-way interaction (p = .012) between log(TFDbrand) and brand familiarity. The percentage of respondents recalling the brand increased about two percent if they fixated on the brand elements longer—as long as it was the less familiar brand (See Figure 7). When brand familiarity is high, however, fixating on the brand name is associated with a two percent decrease in brand recall.
RQ1 Summary. In general, recall was largely improved by increased attention and higher brand familiarity rather than by creativity. The only exception appeared to be when respondents paid considerable attention to the brand-related elements of the advertisement for familiar brands, which had a slight negative influence.
Memory: Recognition
Advertisement Recognition. Advertisements were correctly recognized 84.1 percent of the time. The advertisement recognition model showed one-way significant effects (p < .0001) for log(TFDbrand) and log(TFDadvertisement). Although there were no significant one-way effects of creativity or brand familiarity, their interaction was significant (p = .032; See Figure 8). When brand familiarity was high, creativity increased advertisement recognition. When brand familiarity was low, creativity resulted in an even greater rise in advertisement recognition. Familiar brands had a significant advertisement recognition advantage when advertisements were not creative, but the advantage was eroded when advertisements were creative.
Brand Recognition. Subjects correctly recognized 48.2 percent of the brands. The results in Table 3 for brand recognition show significant one-way effects (p < .0001) for brand familiarity, log(TFDadvertisement), and log(TFDbrand) respondent differences and advertisements (nested within the creativity treatment).
The results for brand recognition in Table 3 identify two significant two-way interactions. The first was between log(TFDbrand) and brand familiarity (p = .032; See Figure 9). Longer fixation on brand elements increased recognition for familiar brands, but the increase was even larger for less familiar brands. Similar to the effects seen for brand recall, high levels of fixation removed the brand recognition advantage that larger brands enjoy. Finally, there was a significant interaction between creativity and brand familiarity (p < .0001). Creativity had a negative influence on brand recognition when brand familiarity was high (See Figure 10). When brands were low in familiarity, however, creativity enhanced brand recognition.
RQ2 Summary. Overall, creativity played a stronger role in recognition than recall. When unfamiliar brands used highly creative advertisements, such advertisements decreased the recognition advantages that familiar brands usually enjoy. Advertisements for less familiar brands were less recognized, but creativity enhanced their recognition more than for those of familiar brands. Creativity enhanced advertisement recognition for unfamiliar brands so much that it leveled the advertisement recognition playing field (See Figure 8). When familiar brands used highly creative advertisements, however, their brand recognition declined in an absolute sense (See Figure 10).
Summary and Additional Findings
The authors present a summary of results for creativity and brand familiarity (See Table 4), as well as data on the final model (See Figure 11). There were four model links where brand familiarity was moderated by creativity: attention, brand affect, advertisement recognition, and brand recognition.
Although H1 was supported, there were unexpected findings regarding attention to the advertisement. For unfamiliar brands, creativity increased the attention to the advertisement and the brand elements. This is not surprising in itself, but what was unanticipated was that, for familiar brands, creativity shifted attention from the advertisement as a whole to the brand elements; that is, creativity decreased the attention to the non-brand advertisement elements for familiar brands.
DISCUSSION
To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that explored the effects of creativity on familiar versus unfamiliar brands. The primary contribution is that highly creative advertising may negatively influence familiar brands. This supports some brand managers’ contentions that less creative approaches to advertising are better at reinforcing positive affect toward, and heightened memory for, familiar brands (e.g., Kover, 2016). This research also shows that highly creative advertising has a positive effect on unfamiliar brands. Highly creative advertising may be best used by less familiar brands. On two key measures, brand affect and brand recognition, creative advertisements for familiar brands had a clear negative influence. Unfamiliar brands, however, were enhanced on these two measures using the same creative advertisements.
The effect of creativity on attention was also moderated by brand familiarity. Control advertisements for familiar brands drew more total attention than did the same advertisements for unfamiliar brands. When creative advertisements are used by less familiar brands, they narrow or eliminate the advantages that familiar brands usually have. When unfamiliar brands use creative advertisements, for example, they get a substantial boost in total attention to the advertisement, far above the level enjoyed by familiar brands. Although creativity enhanced the visual fixations on the brand elements of advertisements for both familiar and unfamiliar brands, the effect was more pronounced for unfamiliar brands, increasing by 50 percent.
The findings support the conventional wisdom of many brand managers for familiar brands: Creativity needs to be carefully managed. Creativity appears to work on consumers by supporting cognitive flexibility and limiting the inhibiting of attention directed toward advertising. Its effects are positive when executive functions are invoked for new tasks such as understanding unfamiliar brands, but these same executive functions did not perform as well when dealing with familiar brands.
One reason for the problems seen with creative advertising for familiar brands may be that the respondents already know much about them, and this interfered with the implicatures the creative advertisements suggested. Many creative advertisements often make implicatures that do not fit the familiar brands, possibly leaving consumers confused. Such confusion takes more time to process and may lead to negative effects on brand liking and brand recognition—even though the advertisements themselves are well liked and well recognized.
The findings should be set in context with Vaughan, Beal, and Romaniuk (2016). They argued that brand users remember advertisements for their brands better than nonusers, so one should take brand usage measures when testing consumers for advertisement memory. In a representative sample, however, the brand with the highest share is typically the most familiar, and it will also have the most brand users, thus presenting a natural confound. Although it is likely that both the consumer’s brand usage and familiarity play a role in which advertisements get remembered, researchers need to know more about the mechanisms involved.
The findings also support the value of creativity for less well-known brands. These brands have little to lose from using creative advertisements and much to gain from the added attention they provide, yet the power of creative advertising is not limited to increased attention. For unfamiliar brands, creativity enhanced brand affect directly, as well as advertisement and brand recognition. If one’s brand is an underdog brand, one should seek out highly creative work. Rather than a technique to be used only when the brand is in trouble (West and Berthon, 1997), seeking highly creative advertising campaigns is a strategy appropriate for any less familiar brand.
Future research should consider the use of delay in testing recall to determine whether the distinctiveness of creative advertising helps such advertisements to be less prone to decay than standard advertising. Another direction may be the role of creativity in competitive interference. More distinctive, creative advertisements should be more resistant to advertising interference. Finally, this study needs to be replicated in other media and more advertisements.
These results have implications for both practitioners and models of how advertising works. In the marketplace battle for consumers’ scarce attention, fickle attitudes, and malleable memory, creativity is still viewed as the heart of advertising. These results, however, indicate that it is not a one-size-fits-all scenario, and one needs to know about when to use highly creative advertising and when it is less appropriate. Although creativity remains a powerful tool for gaining attention and enhancing memory, these results illustrate how its influence is contingent on brand familiarity. This research is an important step in the continued exploration of what drives advertising effectiveness.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Ahmed Hamed al-Shuaili is assistant dean, academic support affairs, at University of Technology and Applied Sciences, Nizwa, Oman. He received his PhD from Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia and his thesis focused on advertising creativity.
Scott Koslow is a professor of marketing at Macquarie University, Australia. He specializes in research about advertising creativity and has worked with most major agency brands. His work can be found in the Journal of Advertising Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Advertising, and Journal of Consumer Research. Koslow is a recipient of the Advertising Research Foundation’s Great Mind Award for JAR Best Reviewer.
Mark Kilgour is a senior lecturer of marketing in the Waikato Management School, at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. Over the past two decades, Kilgour has worked throughout southeast Asia and Australasia in both private consultancy and academic positions. His current research focuses on creativity and innovation, social media, and omnichannel retailing. His creativity research has been published in a range of journals, including Journal of Advertising Research, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, and Journal of Advertising.
- Received December 22, 2022.
- Received (in revised form) May 16, 2023.
- Accepted May 17, 2023.
- Copyright © 2023 ARF. All rights reserved.
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