Banner Advertising Psychology

Posted in Banner Advertising     

Banner Advertising Psychology

Researchers have jumped to the conclusion that through exposing yourself to a single product over and over again through banner ads would bring you to have a positive feeling on that particular product. A good news to consumers would be that a critical product revaluation could make these positive feelings vanish.

To be able to put this to the test, they tried asking students to read an essay with a number of web pages with the impression that they would be fielding the inquiries on the content of the essay. However, the students were actually quizzed regarding a fictitious camera brand, Pretec, which has appeared as banner advertisements on the web pages they were reading on. Various pools of students were exposed to the Pretec advertisements zero, five, or twenty times.

When they were asked about their negative feelings toward the brand, the amount of exposures did not have any difference. On the contrary, those students who were asked about their positive vibes toward the brand reported an increase in their positive feelings based on the amount of exposures. Apparently, there are two models that are striving to explain this kind of phenomenon. The first would be that people would more willingly have positive feelings and could more readily keep things in their memory. The second states that the processing of minimal exposures could create a positive evaluation. This positive effect would then influence any future evaluations.

To know which of these explanations is correct, the authors tried to take another group of students and then asked them to do a similar evaluation and found out that the first model was the valid one.

So ultimately, psychologists do have a better hold on their theories, as advertisers just have a couple of things to keep in mind. Banner advertising could provide a very valuable function in the process of fostering familiarity. Familiarity-based advertising might work best for those impulse buys, where the more detailed evaluations are not as likely to occur.