Familiarity Attracts Consumer Attention: Two Methods to Objectively Measure Consumer Brand Familiarity

Abstract

Brand familiarity is an important and frequently used concept in marketing research and practice. Existing measures of brand familiarity typically rely on subjective self-reports and Likert scales. Here we develop and empirically test two implicit measures to quantify brand familiarity. Based on research in visual attention and computer image processing, observers in a first visual search task are incentivized to quickly find a target brand among varying numbers of competitor brands. In the second approach, we measure the speed at which observers can identify a target brand that is gradually revealed. Both approaches are validated in preregistered experiments. Results show that reaction times predict brand familiarity on an individual level beyond conventional self-reports, even when controlling for “bottom-up” visual features of the brand logo. Our findings offer an innovative way to objectively measure brand familiarity and contribute to the understanding of consumer attention.