The Moderating Influence of Advertising Context on Ad Repetition Effects: The Role of Amount and Type of Elaboration

Although several advertising studies report that message repetition leads to favorable evaluation of the advertised brand, a surprisingly large number of studies fail to find this repetition effect. This article investigates the influence of the advertising context in which the ad is presented on the repetition effect. The ad context, along with the ad content and individual differences in expertise, are found to influence the type of elaboration (item-specific and relational elaboration) a message receives. Message repetition affects evaluation when the additional exposures facilitate the complementary generation of these two types of elaboration of the ad message. When either type of elaboration dominates or when the message recipient spontaneously generates the impoverished type of elaboration, the effect of ad repetition is not observed. These findings provide evidence for the distinct influence on evaluation of the amount and type of elaboration that an advertising message receives. (c) 2007 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..