How Visual Brand Identity Shapes Consumer Response

Another really interesting study I read for my research proposal was How Visual Brand Identity Shapes Consumer Response, which was published in the journal Psychology and Marketing.  The study looked first at visuals which were associated with certain kinds of brands, and then what the effect was if the visuals of one brand were interchanged with another.

"Consumers often can identify the brand sponsor of an ad with a quick glance, even before the logo is glimpsed and without reading any of the text.  A beach scene in a beer ad elicits Corona; a mother and a child in a soup calls out Campbell's.  This suggests that nonverbal elements play a prominent role in branding."    The first example to highlight this in the study was the example in Figure 1 shown for Campbell's soup.  The nature of this advert is far removed from the traditional advertisements used for Campbell's as identified in Figure 2, and as a result many people would not conceive that to be a Campbells's ad if the text was removed.  What especially bothered test subjects who were shown this image was interestingly enough the way that the can was cut off at the bottom of the page.  A soup can is usually central to Campbell's adverts, and even without the logo or text-related visuals that kind of layout is recognisable to consumers of the soup brand.  

Figure 1

Figure 2

Taking inspiration from this advertising mishap, the researchers decided to swap the brand visuals of Skyy Vodka, a popular drinks brand, with that of Malibu rum.  Shown below are the original visuals for both brands, showing a strong VBI - Visual Brand Identity - corresponding to each brand.  The highly sexualised ads for Skyy with hyper colour schemes and glossy visuals are a contrast to those of Malibu, where the colour schemes are a bit more muted and the product and fruit seems to be personified making the ads more humorous.

Consumers of the respective brands have come to identify them through these consistent visuals.  "Consumer brand knowledge is the person meanings of a brand stored in consumer memory, which includes both descriptive and evaluative brand related information (citing Keller, 2003)."  The connotations we associate with brands are organised in the brain in what is known as a schema, which are "developed through repeated exposure and experience within a domain, and it seems likely that regular exposure to advertising that repeats certain themes and elements plays a central role in building brand schemas (citing Goodstein, 1993)."  In the context of the Skyy vodka advertisements,  "It is easy to see why Skyy ads might be recognisable to consumers even with the brand name masked, because the individual ad elements are so similar between ad executions."

Figure 3

"Each of these liquor ads contains consistent and positive visual elements and themes for its target audience when associated with the correct brand (identified through the visual cue of the package)"

For the experiment, the visuals of two of the posters shown above were altered, switching the recognisable bottle shape and label.  This was done in order to find out if it was the visuals outwith the actual product placement that consumers would respond to positively.  It was noted that "previous marketing research on consumer processing suggests that advertisements with consistent (familiar) visual elements may lead to procession fluency and liking; visual themes that are congruent with expectations also may lead to liking when prior brand evaluation is positive." This would suggest that the images shown in Figure 4 would not be well-recieved by customers familiar with the brand advertisements.  

Figure 4

"When associated with a different brand, the VBI is strongly incongruent because none of the brand visual cues in the ad are associated with that brand."

The images in Figure 4 were shown to 146 university students who were 21 or over, who initially  had shown no preference for the original advertisements shown in Figure 3.   Half of the subjects were shown the images in Figure 3 as they were, while the other half were shown the altered images shown in Figure 4.   The scale of Centality for Visual Product Aesthetics (CVPA) was used to work out  how important the actual product visuals were to the consumers of each brand.

It was found that those who preferred the images congruent with VBI (Figure 3) also scored higher than average on the CVPA scale.  This showed that these subjects had greater "aesthetic centrality" - a higher sensitivity to image perception and likely had a better recall on what typical Malibu or Skyy visuals looked like.   "…participants low in aesthetic centrality did not see much difference between congruent and incongruent ads, while participants high in aesthetic centrality liked the congruent ads significantly more." Of course, these findings are only limited to the advertisements for the two alcohol brands, so this cannot necessarily be applied to all products with strong VBIs across the board.

This research paper links to my own work looking at familiarisation - while VBI recognition is not the same thing, it is useful to have found further evidence that consumers may react to visuals which they recognise, in this case part of a brand.

References

Phillips, B, McQuarrie, E, and Griffin, W.G. 2014.  Journal of Psychology and Marketing. "How Visual Brand Identity Shapes Consumer Response". Vol 31 no3.  pp225-236

All images are screen shots from the above paper.