Creative Advertising Executions Encourage the Processing Advantages of Product Familiarity

Abstract Despite ease of processing from greater prior knowledge and expertise, high-familiarity consumers often fail to process product-specific information more than low-familiarity consumers. This paradox of familiarity makes reaching consumers particularly difficult for new brands of familiar products. A creative execution corollary proposes that sufficiently engaging executions should motivate advertising engagement such that high-familiarity consumers’ experience and well-developed associative networks permit them to locate and retain relevant information better than low-familiarity consumers. Two experiments demonstrate that sufficient creative executions (i.e., humor and/or athlete endorsers) enhance attention, processing, and recall of brand-relevant information for a familiar versus unfamiliar product, but no difference when advertisements feature insufficient or no creative executions.