Consumer Behavior: Building Marketing Strategy 13th Edition by Delbert Hawkins, David Mothersbaugh

Exercise 52

Art Infusion: A Path to Greater Brand Extendibility
Marketers would like their brands to be more extendable in many cases because it increases their options to leverage existing brand equity. Research has found that one path to increased brand extendibility is by using visual art in a brand's advertising. For example, Vincent Van Gogh's painting "Starry Night" was used as the "art" visual in an ad for a brand of MP3 player called Consul (this was the core product and brand). The "non-art" visual was a picture of a night sky. These two ads were used to advertise the Consul MP3 player and then consumers were asked about both the Consul MP3 player and about their perceptions of two possible extensions, namely, Consul clothing (a lower-fitting extension with MP3 players) and Consul digital radios (a higher-fitting extension with MP3 players). The following effects were found when comparing the effects of the art visual advertisement to the non-art visual advertisement: 90
• The art visual in the ad increased brand image for the Consul MP3 player.
• The art visual in the ad increased the perceived fit of the extensions and therefore…
• The art visual increased the perceived extendibility of the Consul brand from MP3 players to both clothing and digital radios.
These effects are worth a bit more explanation. First, visual art has been shown to elicit perceptions of luxury and exclusiveness that spill over (that is, generalize) to the brand in a relatively automatic way. This explains why the art visual enhanced the image of the Consul MP3 brand. Second, visual art in an ad increases consumers' cognitive flexibility, allowing them to see connections between objects that are more different than they would otherwise be able to do. This increases perceived fit even for extensions that are lower in fit, such as when Consul moved from an MP3 player to clothing. Both of these effects operate in such a way that having an art visual in an advertisement increases the extendibility of the brand in the minds of consumers from MP3 players to digital radios and clothing.
The positive effects of visual art occur even when consumers are not familiar with the visual art in question (in this case Van Gogh's "Starry Night"), which means that the use of visual art in advertising does not require that the target audience be art connoisseurs.
Why does visual art increase brand image