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Persuasive Imagery A Consumer Response Perspective
In the literature on response to advertising, for instance, there are two apparently contradictory phenomena that produce a conundrum for those who study the effects of frequent exposures. In the late 1960s, Robert Zajonc demonstrated experimentally that people form a positive feeling toward images to which they have been previously been exposed, a phenomenon that came to be known as the “mere exposure effect.”Within a few years, however, this account was challenged by Daniel Berlyne, whose studies suggested that the positive effect produced by familiarity had limits: Eventually, the viewers would become bored and the affect toward the stimulus would turn negative. Furthermore, over the course of the next two decades, studies that investigated the response specifically to advertisements in repeated exposure consistently showed that although people initially responded positively to repeated ads, they eventually would respond negatively if the exposures were repeated often enough. This effect, referred to as the “inverted U curve,” had the additional advantage of being intuitively consistent with our everyday experience of the cute ad that becomes annoying after excessive exposure. From a research point of view, however, the inverted U response to advertising was in contradiction to the mere exposure effect that had been demonstrated on other images. Thus, an explanation was required.
The essay by Winkielman, Schwarz, Reber, and Fazendeiro argues that the effect of an image on viewers is a function of the experience of processing, rather than any formal property of the ad itself. As part of this argument, they propose that the pleasant experience of “visual fluency” that can occur as an outcome of repeated exposures is what causes viewers to prefer familiar images, rather than the mere fact of repetition. Their position is that any condition that makes an image easy to process (e.g., darkness, lightness, clarity) will cause that image to be preferred, regardless of whether the picture has been previously viewed. Thus, repeated exposure would be expected to cause a positive feeling toward the image, but because of the increased visual fluency achieved through repeated exposure, not because of the exposure per se.Winkielman et al. qualify their argument in an important way, however, by proposing that the visual fluency effect will be mitigated by the viewer’s expectations about the ease of processing. So in a case where ease of processing is expected, the positive affect of visual fluency would not occur. Instead, we might even expect boredom or irritation. One condition in which easy processing would be expected is, of course, repeated exposure.
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