Semantic association of brand images at the implicit level: evidence from repetition blindness

Abstract

A brand is designed to convey the uniqueness of its product and help differentiate it from competitors' offerings. However, consumers' shopping behaviour typically involves a minimum of effort with products being only scanned briefly. This study investigated the potential of exploiting a phenomenon known as semantic repetition blindness (SRB) to assess the implicit semantic association of brands. SRB occurs when only one of two conceptually related images is recalled from a sequence of items displayed in a rapid serial visual presentation. Using brand words and pictures, four product categories were tested for implicit conceptual categorization. Pictures of brands revealed SRB when brands of the same product category were presented. However, under the same conditions, brand words did not produce SRB. The importance of presenting brands in their familiar formats was also observed. The results indicate that this paradigm could be developed as a measure of implicit brand association and recognition.

Repetition Blindness for Faces Reflects Identity Coding but Not Emotion Coding

“…The Complete repetition condition produced the largest repetition blindness effect, showing that repetition blindness can occur for face stimuli: the decline in accuracy averaged 26% across both tasks, but was as large as 51% in the first quarter of trials. The size of the repetition blindness effects was as large-or larger than-that found previously with other types of stimuli, such as objects (32%), products (26%), and brand logos (18%; Kanwisher, Yin, & Wojciulik, 1999;Buttle, et al, 2005;Buttle & Westoby, 2006), and reflects the robustness of the effect.…”

Effects of retrieval practice on conceptual explicit and implicit consumer memory

“…The use of product categories as cues has been used in prior research (e.g. Burke & Srull, 1988;Friestad, 1993;Kumar, 2000;Lee & Sternthal, 1999) and reflects the importance of the product category with respect to brand organisation, processing and retrieval (Buttle, Ball, Zhang, & Raymond, 2005;Fazio, Herr, & Powell, 1992;Mackie & Worth, 1990;Nedungadi, Mitchell, & Berger, 1993). For those taking the explicit test, instructions emphasised the recall of brands that were presented during phase one.…”

Assessing the associations between brand packaging and brand attributes using an indirect performance measure

“…This contrasts with previous research using the repetition blindness paradigm (Buttle et al, 2005) or the Stroop task (Hennessey et al, 2005) where participants were typically tested for more than 50 min each. Note that in the present research, we have voluntarily tested only a small number of participants in order to highlight the effectiveness of the compatibility task reported here in picking up the associations between the items under investigation.…”

“…Alternative techniques include the semantic priming paradigm (e.g., Neely, 1976), the repetition blindness paradigm (e.g., Buttle & Westoby, 2006;Buttle et al, 2005;Kanwisher, 1987), and the semantic differential technique (Henson, Choo, Barnes, & Childs, 2006;Osgood et al, 1957) that is a popular component of the Kansei engineering approach (e.g., Nagamachi, 1995;Schütte, Eklund, Ishihara, & Nagamachi, 2008).…”

“…Examples of such techniques include the Implicit Association Test (Greenwald et al, 1998), the semantic priming paradigm (e.g., Neely, 1976), the repetition blindness paradigm (Buttle, Ball, Zhang, & Raymond, 2005;Buttle & Westoby, 2006;Kanwisher, 1987), and variants of the Stroop task (Hennessey, Bell, & Kwortnik, 2005). All of these techniques have provided potentially useful tools with which to assess semantic associations in marketing research.…”