Something's wrong?! The effect of schema incongruent advertisements and brand familiarity on memory

Absztrakt (kivonat)

Schema incongruent advertisements can potentially increase ad and brand memorability, brand evaluations, and favorability of the ad and the brand. Even though that schema incongruent advertisements are often being used by marketers as creative strategy for making successful ads, the underlying processes of how and why incongruent advertisements work are not yet fully known by researchers. Present research relies on the works of Heckler and Childers (1992), Lange and Dahlén (2003), Halkias and Kokkinaki (2012), and many other studies whose topic of research is schema incongruity in advertising. This research aims to examine whether information incongruent to schemas in advertisements will interact with the factor of brand familiarity to increase the memorability of the advertisement. An experimental, within-subject design was conducted, with 47 participants exposed to four advertisements. Incongruency was manipulated through elements of expectancy and relevancy between setting and situation in the advertisement, and brand familiarity was manipulated by displaying branding elements in the advertisement. Recall was used as memory performance measure, with deductive coding as means of assessing it. Recall was measured so that every correct mention represented a point. It was conceptualized in three ways: (1) as a number of visual elements recalled, (2) as a percentage relative to theoretical maximum performance, and (3) as a percentage relative to empirical maximum performance. Results of the 2x2 factorial ANOVA revealed no significant influence of advertisement incongruity on memory performance. However, familiarity played a significant role, showing that memory performance is greatly increased for familiar, as opposed to unfamiliar brands. Moreover, the research did not yield significant results for the interaction of two independent variables on memory performance. As a recommendation, further research on this topic can include replication study of current paper, with changing level of incongruency as an independent variable or part of an experimental procedure, namely time for which the advertisements were displayed.