The Differential Influence of Repetition on Attention Capture and Affective Response

Marketers seek to accomplish two tasks in promoting their product: 1) attract the attention of consumers, and 2) insure that consumers actually like the product. If practitioners turn to the literature for insight on how to accomplish these tasks, they will find conflicting advice: The literature on attention capture suggests that, in the context of a choice task from a set of products, a novel item will attract attention more effectively than a familiar item (Johnston et al 1990). In contrast, the positive impact of familiarity on affective response is well-documented (Bornstein, 1989; Obermiller, 1985). This presents a challenge for marketers seeking to generate both attention capture and liking. Some insight into how to solve this conundrum may be obtained by looking more carefully at how people go about the visual processing task. The Global Processing Hypothesis suggests that, that, initially, people process the global or dominant or global elements of a stimulus (e.g. the headline or primary visual in an ad), but then, upon further viewing, will process the local or secondary elements of the stimulus such as the copy, other secondary layout elements (Navon, 1985). If this is indeed the case, the most effective marketing communication should be one that has a novel dominant element and familiar secondary elements. We provide support for this hypothesis in several studies in which, via repeated exposure, we manipulate the familiarity of the dominant and secondary features of a series of product packages, and then assess the relative effectiveness of these packages at generating both attention capture and positive affective response. In study 1 we examine the basic influence of familiarity of primary versus secondary elements on attention capture. Study 2 assesses this influence of the familiarity of these elements on affective response. In Study 3 we also manipulate viewing time to assess the relative impact of the primary versus secondary elements on both attention capture and affective response.