1.Referring to this effect as a ‘ feather’ is not meant to deprecate its importance. On the contrary, it is meant to give consumers an intuitive feel for why we often find it difficult to introspect on how advertising affects us. We don’t feel the effect because it is below the JND (just noticeable difference), but that doesn’t mean that feathers aren’t important or effective. They are! If an ad has real news to convey, it can become a very big feather, in which case we don’t need an explanation of the effect. Mostly, however, they are much smaller feathers.
2.William E. Baker, ‘When can affective conditioning and mere exposure directly influence brand choice?’, Journal of Advertising, Vol. 28, No. 4, winter 1999, pp. 31–46.
3.John Deighton, ‘The interaction of advertising and evidence’, Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 11, No. 3, December 1984, pp. 763–70.
4.Scott Hawkins & Stephen Hoch, ‘Low involvement learning: Memory without evaluation’, Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 19, September 1992, pp. 212–25. Scott Hawkins, Joan Meyers-Levy & Stephen Hoch, ‘Low involvement learning: Repetition and coherence in familiarity and belief’, Advances in Consumer Research, VXXII, 1995, p. 63.
5.Especially when the repetition comes from various sources such as different publications—even for low plausability claims—see A.L. Roggeveen & G.V. Johar, ‘Perceived source variability versus familiarity: Testing competing explanations for the truth effect’, Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 12, No. 2, 2002, pp. 81–91.
6.Even though it may be perceptibly small, a single reinforcementreminder exposure can have substantial effects on short-term sales and market share for well established brands with established ad campaigns. See the pioneering work by John Philip Jones, When Ads Work: New proof that advertising triggers sales, Lexington, NY, 1995 and Colin McDonald, ‘From “Frequency” to “Continuity”—is it a new dawn?’, Journal of Advertising Research, Vol. 39, No. 5, JulyAugust 1997, pp. 21–5.
7.M. Von Gonten & J. Donius, ‘Advertising exposure and advertising effects: New panel based findings’, Journal of Advertising Research, Vol. 37, No. 4, JulyAugust 1997, p. 59.
8.S. Shapiro, D. Macinnis & S. Heckler, ‘The effects of incidental ad exposure on the formation of consideration sets’, Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 24, No. 1, June 1997, pp. 94–101.