It’s Gotta Be the Shoes! Performance Enhancement Effects of Novel Brand Advertising

We examine how brand advertising invokes a performance enhancement effect for owned brands that is purely advertising and brand driven and unrelated to material product differences, akin to a placebo effect. Using three field studies, we demonstrate that advertisers may selectively invoke the performance enhancement effect among owners of branded products through brand advertising. Our findings show that exposure to brand advertising can increase performance (i.e., exercise duration in our studies) in excess of 20%. Moreover, we show that brand advertising elicits this enhancement effect only when the target, owned brand is in use and that heightened motivation underlies this effect. Furthermore, the enhancement effect, while sizable, does not last into perpetuity. Instead, we show that consumers acclimate over extended periods of exposure to the brand advertising, consistent with psychological habituation theory. These findings point to the importance of ongoing, novel brand advertising over the product ownership life cycle.