Effects of Brand Logo Complexity, Repetition, and Spacing on Processing Fluency and Judgment

It is generally accepted that repeated exposure to an advertisement can influence liking for an advertisement and for the brand names and product packages included in the advertisement. Although it has often been assumed that repeated exposure leads to a direct affective response, more recent evidence suggests that prior exposure leads to processing fluency at the time of judgment. It is a misattribution about the source of this processing fluency that results in preference for the stimulus. To date, the majority of research on the processing fluency/attribution hypothesis has focused on when people will make fluency-based attributions, while assuming the amount of the processing fluency is a direct function of exposure. In this article, we propose that stimulus characteristics and presentation factors will interact with repetition to determine the amount of processing fluency associated with a stimulus at various levels of exposure. Four studies are used to test whether two-factor theory or dual-process theory provides a better account of the source of the processing fluency. Implications for logo design are discussed.