Easy does it: How the organization of print advertisements influences product evaluations

How can advertisers improve consumer attitudes toward a given brand? Improving the ease with which consumers can process and make sense of an advertisement that features the product appears to be one possible strategy. Eight studies explored whether the location of a familiar or novel product in the context of a print advertisement influences consumer appraisals of the brand. Across five experiments in which participants viewed print advertisements, participants presented with ads that featured familiar brands tended to respond more favorably to those in which the brand appeared in the center, rather than along the margins, of the image. Conversely, participants presented with advertisements of novel brands reported more favorable appraisals when the ad featured the brand along the margins of the image than at the center. This response pattern appears to emerge via a processing fluency mechanism: When the consumer's metacognitive understanding of fluency as a positive evaluative cue changed, the response pattern reversed. These findings indicate that simple aesthetic decisions about the construction of print advertisements could elicit more favorable consumer responses to the featured brand.