Making Ads Stick: Role of Metaphors in Improving Advertising Memory

Abstract

As consumers are exposed to thousands of advertisements daily, researchers have sought to understand what makes people remember certain brands better than they remember others. Metaphors like Carvana’s vending machines and taglines like “Red Bull gives you wings” have increasingly become a powerful way for marketers to communicate brand attributes. In this study, we sought to characterize the memorability of ads across three distinct categories (functional, emotional, and metaphorical) using behavioral and neuroimaging methods. Participants were exposed to 20 ads from each of these categories and underwent a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan while trying to recall details from these ads one week later. We found a significant effect of category on brand recall immediately after exposure and memory recognition for snippets from the ad a week later, with metaphorical and emotional ads outperforming functional ads. Insights from activation in key memory regions like the bilateral hippocampus during retrieval revealed that while people were likely to remember the salient aspects of emotional ads and rate them as highly vivid, they were weaker in recalling additional central details about the brands featured in them relative to metaphorical ads. These findings demonstrate the superiority of metaphorical ads for integrating contents of the ads and the creation of “sticky” brand impressions.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Anthony Resnick for his assistance with data collection, and Han Chen and Nur Onuklu for their assistance with stimulus creation and stimulus selection pretest survey. The authors would also like to thank Drs. Angelika Dimoka and Paul Pavlou for their insights into the initial experimental design. Finally, the authors would like to thank all members at the Center for Applied Research in Decision Making for their feedback on the data analysis and assistance in revising this article.

Notes

1 Data from a subset of participants (mainly Millennials and younger Generation X) from this sample were reported as part of Study 3 in an article looking at differences between print and digital ads (Venaktraman et al. 2021).

Additional information

Funding

The authors are grateful for funding support from the United States Postal Service Office of Inspector General (6HQOIG-17-B-0085).

Notes on contributors

Elizabeth Beard

Elizabeth Beard (B.A., University of Michigan) is a Ph.D. candidate in Decision Neuroscience, Center for Applied Research in Decision Making, Fox School of Business, Temple University, and the Department of Psychology, College of Liberal Arts, Temple University.

Nicole M. Henninger

Nicole M. Henninger (Ph.D., Temple University) is a graduate student, Center for Applied Research in Decision Making, Fox School of Business, Temple University.

Vinod Venkatraman

Vinod Venkatraman (Ph.D., Duke University) is a Associate Professor in Marketing, Center for Applied Research in Decision Making, Fox School of Business, Temple University, and the Department of Marketing and Supply Chain Management, Fox School of Business, Temple University.