Brief encounters with the discarded, degraded and different

The mere exposure effect (hereafter, MEE) is a robust psychological phenomenon whereby judgments of a stimulus are improved simply by incidental and unreinforced exposure to it (Zajonc, 1968). These conditions are common in the contemporary marketing environment, and thus the MEE is relevant to understanding, explaining, and influencing the effects of marketing communication (Bornstein and Craver-Lemley, 2004). On the assumption that the effect is a product of enhanced perceptual fluency (Bornstein & D’Agostino 1992, 1994), marketing-specific mere exposure research has universally employed perceptually identical stimuli at exposure and test. However, psychological (labbased) evidence for the structural MEE and the generalised MEE suggests that the effect may be robust to some violations in perceptual matching between exposure and test/judgment (Gordon and Holyoak, 1983; Winkielman, Halberstadt, Fazendeiro and Catty, 2006; Zebrowitz, White and Wieneke, 2008). This is of great importance to marketing, as brand stimuli are often subject to minor changes in their perceptual form (both planned and unplanned) over time and space. For example, brand logos might be altered between executions while brand packs are encountered in various forms of natural degradation (e.g. litter) in public spaces. This study tests the proposition that the MEE for brand stimuli will be resistant to minor changes in perceptual form between exposure and the point of consumer choice.