The mere exposure hypothesis states that a person's familiarity with a stimulus enhances their liking of it. The purpose of present study was to test the "mere exposure" hypothesis in the context of a tangible projects with unfamiliar color applicatio...
The mere exposure hypothesis states that a person's familiarity with a stimulus enhances their liking of it. The purpose of present study was to test the "mere exposure" hypothesis in the context of a tangible projects with unfamiliar color application. The study utilizes a between-subject experimental design. Familiarity is manipulated by varying the number of exposures to a stimulus. Subjects viewed a 2-minute program of several TV advertisements on a screen. The experimental stimulus (electric pot and razor with unfamiliar color) was interspersed within the video segment. The experimental conditions were: (1) one exposure (low familiarity), (2) five exposures (moderate familiarity), (3) ten exposures (high familiarity). Subjects were randomly assigned to one of the three experimental conditions. After having been exposed to the treatment, subjects responded to a series of semantic differential items designed to measure variables of interest. Analysis of Variance techniques were used to test the hypotheses. Results indicate that there were no significant differences in liking of the product color among subjects based on familiarity with it. However, the mean value changes suggest that familiarity and purchase intention have positive directional movement.