Streetwear ads – How does product familiarity affect how we look at them?

Purpose

The purpose of this research was to study millennial consumers’ attention to online advertisements published by streetwear companies on social media. The aim was to investigate differences between consumers’ attention to familiar products and unfamiliar products. Three hypotheses were constructed to test whether product familiarity affects consumers´ attention to advertisements:

H1: Consumers who are familiar with the products are more likely to look at them in advertisements than consumers who are unfamiliar with the products.
H2: Consumers who are familiar with the products will spend more time looking at them in advertisements than consumers who are unfamiliar with the products.
H3: Consumers who are familiar with the products will find them faster from advertisements than consumers who are unfamiliar with the products.

Method

The study applied between-subjects design by dividing 40 participants into two matched groups based on their gender. Both groups had 10 male and 10 female participants. During the eye tracking experiment, participants in Group 1 were shown three product photos for two seconds and three advertisements containing the same products for four seconds. Participants in Group 2 were only presented with three advertisements for four seconds.

The results of the study are presented in two parts. Firstly, heatmaps give an illustrative overview of the findings and Statistical analysis presents the results of statistical tests. Chi-square test was performed to test the first hypothesis and independent-samples t-tests were performed to test the second and third hypotheses.

Results

The results of the study show that people who were familiar with the products were more likely to look at them in advertisements than consumers who were unfamiliar with the products. Also, people who were familiar with the products spent more time looking at them compared to people who were unfamiliar with the products. However, previous exposure to products did not result in faster identification of the products from advertisements.