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Effect of context on branding

Posted Oct 7th, 2009 at 6:19 AM and seen 2652 times

See our coverage of branding, advertising, and marketing.

Brian Sternthal (professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management) and Myungwoo Nam (assistant professor of marketing at INSEAD) investigated the effect of context on advertising. Context, in this context, is when your product is near unrelated products like dog food in a supermarket or your ad appears after the ads of unrelated products like Rogaine in a magazine.

They found two general effects: assimilation and contrast. Assimilation occurs when the other product enhances the positive feelings toward your product. For example, suppose that you see an ad for Starbucks right after an ad for Audi (in my case anyway). Contrast occurs when the other product creates less favorable feelings about your product.

Very interesting stuff that marketers should consider. Be sure to read the whole article.

 Guy Kawasaki

Comments (1)

Oct 07, 2009
Patrick Au-Yeung said...
The authors of the article have completely neglected to talk about the other context in which their sample ads exist – the medium itself. Are these ads in a luxury magazine? A tabloid? A business magazine? That has a way bigger influence on the perception of the brands than a simple sequential comparison. Imagine seeing a BMW ad and then a JBL ad in, say, Wired Magazine versus Business Week. How would these ads differ? What does it say about the brands? In fact, what does it say about the magazines themselves?

Seems a fairly shallow study on "branding."

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