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Journal of
CONSUMER
PSYCHOLOGY
Journal of Consumer Psychology 21 (2011) 57 – 64

Red Bull “Gives You Wings” for better or worse: A double-edged impact of
brand exposure on consumer performance
S. Adam Brasel a,⁎, James Gips b
a
Marketing Department, Carroll School of Management, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA 04267–3808, USA
b
Information Systems Department, Carroll School of Management, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA 04267–3808, USA

Received 24 December 2009; revised 27 July 2010; accepted 17 September 2010

Available online 17 October 2010

Abstract

We show that brand exposure can have double-sided effects on behavior, with brand identity associations creating both positive and negative
effects on objective consumer performance. Experimental results from a racing game involving functionally identical cars with differently branded
paint jobs show that Red Bull branding creates a U-shaped effect on race performance, as Red Bull's brand identity of speed, power, and
recklessness work both for and against the players. Even though brands were exposed supraliminally, effects traveled through nonconscious
channels. Double-edged effects of branding on consumer performance could be increasingly important as ambient advertising and product
cobranding become more commonplace.
© 2010 Society for Consumer Psychology. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Brand exposure; Performance; Interactivity; Brand identity

As ambient out-of-home advertising and promotional
techniques such as product placement challenge traditional
advertising for marketing dominance (Klara, 2009; LaFerle &
Edwards, 2006), the effects of brand exposure on consumer
behavior have become an increasingly important area of
research. While conducting a prior research study exploring
the efficacy of branded advertising within videogames, four
study assistants had to race various branded cars against regular
players in an online racing game. It was not long before
assistants began friendly arguments over who could use the Red
Bull car as opposed to the other branded cars in the game for any
given race. The assistants knew the cars were identical in
performance and differed only in paint jobs, yet they insistently
claimed that the Red Bull car was faster than the others.
Surprisingly, the assistants' feelings toward the Red Bull car
were reflected in the objective data. Over 80 races, assistants
finished an average of 7 s faster when driving the Red Bull car
than with the other three branded cars. Yet the effects of Red
Bull branding were not unilaterally positive: assistants using the
⁎ Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: brasels@bc.edu (S.A. Brasel), gips@bc.edu (J. Gips).
1057-7408/$ - see front matter © 2010 Society for Consumer Psychology. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.jcps.2010.09.008
Red Bull car made contact with participant cars almost twice as
often as when they were racing in other branded cars, and races
high in car contact resulted in slower race times. This suggests a
double-edged effect for Red Bull brand exposure, where Red
Bull's brand identity could create both positive and negative
pressures on consumer performance.
These differences in performance cannot be explained by the
game; all cars were functionally identical, explicitly labeled with
identical performance numbers during car selection, and the
branded paint jobs had no in-game effect on car performance.
When presented with the results, the assistants were surprised the
effect existed and remarked that there was no logical reason for it;
they said their comments about the Red Bull car during the study
were ‘just joking around’. In this virtual media setting, brand
identity impacted the objective metric of race time through a
highly abstract path, as neither the player nor their in-game avatar
was consuming the product. And while Red Bull's brand identity
characteristics suggest speed, power, and risk-taking, Red Bull's
product attributes of sugar, caffeine, taurine, and ginseng do not
directly impact car performance.
The goal of this article is to explore whether brand exposure
may be double-sided, having simultaneous positive and
58 S.A. Brasel, J. Gips / Journal of Consumer Psychology 21 (2011) 57–64
negative effects across consumers on performance. Also, we
look to test whether abstract brand exposure can impact
objective consumer performance metrics as it has been shown
to affect self-expression, subjective performance, and choice
outcomes (such as the effects of the Apple brand in Fitzsimons,
Chartrand, & Fitzsimons, 2008). And although brand exposure
has touch points in a number of current marketing research
streams, work on incidental brand exposure remains limited
(Ferraro, Bettman, & Chartrand, 2009), and potential double-
sided effects on performance are not currently addressed in the
literature.
Exploring the double-sided effects of brand exposure
Early work on brand cues illustrated that brand identity
played a large role in priming judgments of product quality and
enjoyment of the consumption process (Allison & Uhl, 1964).
This work was extended by research into brand placebo effects,
where brand primes conveyed brand identity-consistent benefits
to consumers even if the actual product consumed was not the
branded product (Irmak, Block, & Fitzsimons, 2005; Shiv,
Carmon, & Ariely, 2005). Recent work has extended brand
priming effects to non-consumption environments, where even
incidental or nonconscious exposure to a brand can trigger goal-
relevant behavior and cognitions. Within Chartrand's (2005)
framework of nonconscious consumer behavior, brand expo-
sure can serve as an environmental cue that triggers noncon-
scious behavioral processes, which lead to various behavioral
outcomes. The mere presence of the brand could activate brand
identity-consistent traits and concepts, which exert pressure on
behavior, such as in Dijksterhuis, Smith, VanBaaren, and
Wigboldus' (2005) “high road of imitation” or Fitzsimons et al.
(2008) brand priming work using associative network models.
Unlike traditional advertising or mere exposure, however,
placing brand information on real-world and virtual objects that
consumers can interact with offers a second potential route of
influence within consumer behavior. As transformational
advertising (Puto & Wells, 1984) transfers affect and cultural
value into the brand, so exposure to the brand is inexorably
linked with the affective experience portrayed in advertising.
Placing brands onto objects under consumer control could
transfer those cultural values and affect to the consumer
(McCracken, 1986), even if the brand itself is not being used or
consumed in a traditional sense. As the branded object becomes
a temporary possession and part of the consumer's extended self
(Belk, 1988), consumer performance may be affected by the
transformative experience of the brand's advertising. Brands are
complex, multidimensional constructs with varied constella-
tions of cultural meaning (Aaker, 1997; Keller, 2003), so brand
exposure effects are likely not constrained to linear and
unidimensional routes of expression and may serve cross-
purposes on various metrics.
Interactive media such as video games represent an ideal
context to explore the potential for double-sided effects of brand
exposure on consumer performance, as they allow for almost
complete experimental control over the stimulus environment
and can test objective performance without risk to study
participants. Extending preliminary explorations into brand
priming effects on objective metrics, which have focused on
abstract tasks such as how long an individual can hold his or her
leg in the air (Friedman & Elliot, 2008), video games and game
performance represent a more natural environment for explor-
ing brand exposure effects (Hang and Auty, this issue). Prior
work suggests that brand exposure effects occur when they are
relevant to consumer goals (Bargh, 2002; Lee & Shavitt, 2006),
and video game play is highly goal-driven (Clark & Duimering,
2006; Wolf, 2001) with both metagoals of overall game
performance and transient microgoals created by the constant
vigilance of interacting with game content (Stewart & Pavlou,
2002). Games thus represent an opportunity to test brand
exposure effects without external goal-setting tasks or manip-
ulations, capturing natural and internally driven consumer
behavior.
Methods
To explore the potential for double-sided effects of brand
exposure on objective performance, a laboratory study was
conducted using a racing video game as the stimulus
environment. We selected the game Forza Motorsport 2 for
the Xbox 360 game console, as it includes a vector-based
painting program to create branded paint jobs for cars and high-
definition graphics that create a vivid visual environment. The
MINI Cooper served as the study car because even less
experienced gameplayers would find it easy to control and its
geometry simplified the process of applying brand imagery.
In a racing game, speed and time to complete the race are
objective performance metrics where many brand categories
have relevant identity dimensions without necessarily having
directly relevant product attributes. Energy drinks, for example,
have brand identities that are relevant to goals of automotive
speed, power, and performance, even as their product attributes
are irrelevant to auto-racing performance. The beverage
category also contains varied brand personality positions with
high overall awareness of popular brands, making it an ideal
category for study of brand exposure.
The Red Bull brand, for example, has cultivated a brand
identity that resonates with concepts of speed, energy, and
aggressive risk-taking. In addition to their “Gives You Wings”
slogan, Red Bull has built their brand identity through
promotions such as sponsoring downhill street luge contests,
airplane races, and creating full-contact ice-skating obstacle
courses known as “Crashed Ice.” On the website brandtags.net,
where users enter words or phrases they associate with brands,
nine of the 40 most commonly occurring terms for Red Bull
deal with speed and power (such as hyper, power, and speed),
and four pertain to risk-taking and recklessness (such as
dangerous and extreme). In comparison, the 14 other most
popular drink brands at brandtags.net average less than one
speed or power associated word per brand and almost zero risk-
taking or recklessness associated words per brand.
These personality associations of speed, power, and risk-
taking suggest that Red Bull brand exposure may engender both
positive and negative effects on performance. In the context of a
 S.A. Brasel, J. Gips / Journal of Consumer Psychology 21 (2011) 57–64
racing game, the Red Bull brand identity may influence
consumers to attempt to finish the race as fast as possible,
pushing the car and their abilities to the limit in order to achieve
the fastest lap scores. At the same time, these brand
characteristics could encourage people to race too hard, pushing
the car and themselves beyond their limits of performance and
skill. This could lead to consumers taking too aggressive of a
racing line, going off track, or even crashing, leading to the
opposite effect on race performance than the brand identity
might suggest. So compared to a more neutral drink brand, Red
Bull brand exposure could serve as an environmental trigger
that encourages faster and more aggressive racing, leading to
double-edged effects on performance outcomes.
On the basis of brandtags.net data, we selected four brands
for paint jobs: Coca-Cola, Guinness, Tropicana, and the target
brand of Red Bull (see Fig. 1). The brands were pretested on a
separate group of 33 students as to their brand personality
associations. The four stimulus brands were equally familiar to
participants (all means N 6 on the 7-point brand familiarity scale,
Fig. 1. The five cars used in the time trial races.
59
with 1 = very unfamiliar and 7 = very familiar) and had no
significant differences on perceived relevance to automobile
racing. Red Bull, as expected, loaded strongly on the speed-
relevant aspects of brand personality, scoring at least 1 point
higher (on 7-point semantic differential scales) than any other
brand on the items fast, powerful, energetic, daring, and
aggressive, at least 2 points higher than the average brand score,
and was the only brand to score significantly above the scale
midpoint on these items (all t(32) N 15.3 p b 0.001). The four
brands did not significantly differ on other measured personality
facets less relevant to the racing environment such as intelligent,
successful, honest, charming, tough, cheerful, or wholesome.
Participants
Seventy participants (mean age = 21; 38% female, 62% male)
were recruited on campus. No participant had taken part in the
pretest. Participants reported varying levels of prior overall
video game experience (M = 3.14, SD = 1.67, on a 7-point scale
60 S.A. Brasel, J. Gips / Journal of Consumer Psychology 21 (2011) 57–64
ranging from 1 = novice and 7 = expert) and were equally
familiar with all four target car brands (brand familiarity
means all N6 on a 7-point scale). All were compensated with a
$10 gift certificate to a leading online retailer regardless of race
performance.
Protocol
Participants completed informed consent and a presurvey
detailing general media usage habits and video game experience
upon first entering the laboratory. They were then seated
roughly 56 in. from a 36-in. high-definition television at a table-
mounted Microsoft Xbox 360 Wireless Racing Wheel, which
includes a force-feedback steering wheel and weighted gas and
brake pedals. The game was set-up to use a “chase camera”
above and behind the car (see Fig. 2); the car occupied roughly
one-sixth of the screen.
Participants first were allowed five laps of practice using an
unbranded white MINI to familiarize themselves with the
control system, handling of the car, and the race course they
would be using in the study. They were then instructed that they
would be completing a series of three-lap races and to finish
each race as quickly as possible. The participant then completed
a series of five “time trial” three-lap races using the four branded
cars and a fifth unbranded green car included to serve as a
baseline control. In these time trials, the participant's car was
alone on the track and the goal was to set the best personal time.
This race style offered the most unbiased test of performance;
the track remained invariant across time trials and there was no
introduced variance from the unpredictable behavior of
opponent cars.
Every participant raced each of the four branded cars and the
unbranded green car once in their set of five races. Other than
the paint jobs, the cars were identical with no performance
differences between the vehicles, and all were explicitly labeled
with the same performance numbers on the car selection screen.
Fig. 2. Participants' view of race.
The order in which the participants raced the five stimulus cars
was randomly selected from a master list of combinations,
ensuring that each brand would appear in each race position an
equal number of times and that no consistent pattern would
emerge of brands appearing before or after each other across all
races. The assistants selected the appropriate car for each race
from a garage screen, and the car selected for the next race was
shown in a large rotating image on the top three quarters of the
screen, serving as an initial brand identity prime before
subsequent brand exposure. Once the car was selected, the
participant completed a three-lap time trial of the Maple Valley
East racetrack with the selected car. This process was then
repeated for the other four cars. After each race the objective
performance metrics were recorded, and after the set of five
races participants completed a survey as to their subjective
experience utilizing a number of 7-point scales.
Results
Manipulation checks
Survey measures postrace suggest that participants found the
task engaging overall (MInteresting = 4.77; MExciting = 4.69) and
were not overwhelmed by the experience (MExhausting = 2.67;
MOverwhelming = 2.51). Participants were motivated by the game
to perform well and to attempt to finish quickly (M = 5; 77% of
respondents reported above the scale midpoint). Participants
were aware of the brand exposures used; in a recognition set of
14 brands, all four stimuli brands scored means of at least 6.4
out of 7; all of the nonpresent brands scored below 2.6. Post hoc
survey measures supported that participants in the study
mirrored the brand judgments of the pretest. Red Bull was
seen as significantly more fast, aggressive, reckless, and daring
than the other brands (see Table 1), but it did not significantly
differ on other personality dimensions.
 S.A. Brasel, J. Gips / Journal of Consumer Psychology 21 (2011) 57–64
Table 1
Participants' ratings of how terms describe brands.
Brand Fast Energetic
Red Bull 5.93 ⁎ (1.21) 6.36 ⁎ (1.03)
Coca-Cola 4.71 (1.45) 5.39 (1.31)
Guinness 3.23 (3.23) 3.66 (1.66)
Tropicana 2.66 (1.45) 4.67 (1.61)
Note. Ratings were made on a scale from 1 = not at all to 7 = very much so. Values presented are means with standard deviations in parentheses.
⁎ p b 0.01 for paired-sample t tests with all three other brands. All t tests higher than t(70) = 5.51.
There was a learning curve effect in race performance,
especially in the first two races. Participants improved an average
of 7 s from their first race to their fifth (see Fig. 3). This
improvement across races suggests that we cannot simply
combine all data from the race replications and measure effects
on overall race times. Instead, race time was transformed postrace
into two key performance metrics. First, an individual partici-
pant's five races were rank-ordered from fastest to slowest to
create a performance ranking metric. Second, each individual's
race time was transformed into a normalized difference score,
calculated as the difference in time between that particular race
and the participant's mean race time across their five races,
divided by that individual's mean race time, to control for
differences in performance between participants. Smaller values
on this normalized difference measure for a particular brand
across participants suggest that a brand tends to perform near the
mean with respect to time, whereas larger values across
participants suggest that a brand tends to perform away from
the mean. In addition to controlling for learning effects, these
transformations help take into account large variances in skill and
overall times between participants that could render direct
comparisons of raw race times inappropriate.
The effects of branding on performance
The first performance metric to explore was the perfor-
mance ranking of each individual's races from fastest to
slowest. As the order of branded cars was randomized so that
across the study panel each brand appeared in each race
Fig. 3. A learning curve showing the mean time to complete the race for each
race number for all participants.
61
Aggressive Daring Imaginative Successful
5.46 ⁎ (1.56) 5.06 ⁎ (1.73) 3.74 (1.81) 4.30 (1.84)
4.04 (1.67) 3.31 (1.66) 4.07 (1.67) 5.19 (1.90)
3.79 (1.67) 3.73 (1.76) 3.74 (1.66) 4.66 (1.81)
2.36 (1.32) 2.01 (1.13) 3.06 (1.62) 4.83 (1.68)
position (first car raced, second car raced, etc.) the same
number of times, each brand should appear in each ranking
position roughly equally if brand exposure had no effect on
performance (i.e., across participants Red Bull should be the
fastest car roughly as often as it is the second fastest car, etc.). A
Chi-squared test for each brand showed that for four of the five
cars, there was no significant difference across rankings. For
the Red Bull car, however, there was a significantly uneven
distribution across rankings, χ2 (4, N = 70) = 9.67, p b 0.05. As
shown in Fig. 4, the Red Bull distribution is strongly U-shaped;
the Red Bull car is most likely to be an individual's fastest or
slowest car and is only rarely the middle-performing car out of
the five cars raced.
To explore if this double-edged effect was also present in the
difference measure, we ran an analysis of variance (ANOVA)
with the normalized difference measure as the dependent variable,
car brand as the independent variable, and race number and video
game experience as covariates to control for learning effects and
expertise. The overall ANOVA was significant, F(4,64) = 3.17,
p b 0.05, with car brand having a significant effect on normalized
difference from the mean, without significant interactions with
race number or experience covariates. Tukey's HSD and Fisher's
LSD (both p b 0.05) reveal that the Red Bull condition is
significantly different from the other car conditions. Contrasting
Red Bull to the other four cars revealed a positive effect for Red
Bull, all paired t(68) N 2.38, p b 0.05. The presence of the Red Bull
brand increased normalized difference scores, showing Red Bull
brand exposure pushed performance away from participants'
mean performance. This finding reinforces the U-shaped pattern
seen in the rank–order histogram and supports that Red Bull
brand exposure has a double-sided effect on performance.
Fast race times are consistent with Red Bull's identity of
speed and power, but how does Red Bull exposure also lead to
slow race times? The answer lies partially in the amount of time
participants spend off track. The race track is bordered by grass,
sand, and dirt, all of which slow the car dramatically and make
steering difficult, causing participants to lose time as they
attempt to return to the track. The amount of time spent off track
had a significant effect on overall race performance (r2 = 0.13),
F(1,68) = 41.15, p b 0.001; the more time spent off track, the
longer the total race time becomes (B = 0.742). Examining the
instances where Red Bull was participants' fourth or fifth fastest
car, versus when it was their first or second fastest, supports this
analysis. When participants were slower in the Red Bull car
than their middle-performing race, they spent an average of 4 s
more off track compared to their off-track average across their
five races. When participants were faster in the Red Bull car
62 S.A. Brasel, J. Gips / Journal of Consumer Psychology 21 (2011) 57–64
Fig. 4. The number of participants who had their fastest race (second fastest race,
etc.) when driving the Red Bull car (upper panel) or when driving all non-Red
Bull branded cars combined (lower panel).
than their middle-performing race, they spent an average of 3 s
less off track compared to their off-track average across their
five races. This suggests that Red Bull encourages participants
to pursue a fast, aggressive racing strategy, which results in fast
times for some participants, but an increase in off-track time led
to decreased performance for participants pursuing overaggres-
sive driving strategies.
Using brand familiarity and prior experience drinking Red
Bull as a predictor in linear, logarithmic, or quadratic tests on
race performance shows no significant effects (no p
values b 0.55). This suggests that the effect of Red Bull on
participant performance cannot be explained as a form of direct
brand placebo effect, where exposure to the brand activates
prior experience with the product, generating a vicarious
caffeine effect due to memory of the product attributes. This
provides further support for an indirect effect of brand
personality characteristics on consumer performance.
Were participants conscious of the effects Red Bull was
having on their performance? Participants were asked in the
postsurvey whether they felt any performance differences
among the cars, and if they did, which cars felt faster or slower.
Only 44% of participants responded that they felt a difference
among the cars, and there was no consistent pattern to their
responses. All four branded cars and the unbranded green car
were listed as both “faster” and “slower” across participants
who responded that they felt performance differences, and their
ratings of cars as faster and slower had no significant predictive
effect on their race times. This suggests that even though the
brand prime and exposure are being presented supraliminally,
the effect of the Red Bull brand exposure is happening outside
of conscious attention. This is also supported in that a number of
traditional cognitive measures had no impact on the results.
When included as covariates in an ANOVA measuring the
effect of brand on the difference measure, (a) self-reports of
prior game-playing expertise; (b) self-ratings of real-life driving
speed, aggression, or risk-taking; and (c) measures of how
interesting, involving, or stimulating they found the task all had
no effect on the strength of the brand exposure effect on
performance. These results suggest that both the behavioral
response to the environmental cue of the brand exposure, as
well as the behavioral outcome, are operating outside of
conscious awareness.
Discussion
Results of a laboratory study where participants used a video
game to race a series of cars that were functionally identical but
covered in branded paint jobs from various beverages show that
brand priming and exposure can have a double-edged effect on
consumer performance metrics. Consumers racing a car with a
Red Bull paint job performed either considerably faster or
slower than they did in other branded cars. Red Bull's
personality associations of speed, power, aggressiveness, and
recklessness either pushed consumers to the edge of their
ability, leading to very fast races overall, or pushed them
beyond their ability, leading to higher off-track times and
slower races overall. Indeed, Red Bull was the only brand with a
significantly uneven race speed distribution, showing a strong
U-shaped effect on race time; Red Bull was most commonly a
participant's fastest or slowest car.
Our study answers a call in the literature for further
exploration into multidimensional effects of branding within
consumer behavior (Keller, 2003). The double-edged effect of
Red Bull in this current study could be happening due to
different nodes in a brand's associative network (Smith &
Queller, 2004) serving cross-purposes on a consumer goal, or
one aspect of brand identity working to varying levels on
different consumers. Likewise, the complex constellation of
cultural meanings and values imbued into a product such as Red
Bull (McCracken, 1986) may impact different consumers in
different ways based on their current relationships with those
meanings and values. Future work may explore how the
associative network process and the cultural transformation
 S.A. Brasel, J. Gips / Journal of Consumer Psychology 21 (2011) 57–64
process that are both likely at play for branded objects combine
or interact in real-world and virtual brand exposure scenarios.
Prior work on brand exposure in the product placement
literature has traditionally focused on issues of awareness,
purchase intent, and choice (Balasubramanian, Karrh, &
Patwardhan, 2006; Hackley & Tiwsakul, 2006), and work on
incidental brand exposure has shared this focus (Ferraro et al.,
2009). Our results suggest that brand placement can affect
consumer performance beyond traditional marketing metrics
and highlight the need for increased work on brand exposure as
brand placement replaces traditional advertising in marketing
campaigns. These results echo some of the prior findings on
brand placebos, which have shown how believed consumption
of branded products can impact objective performance metrics
such as number of tasks completed (Shiv et al., 2005) and
physical reflexes (Irmak et al., 2005). The current work does not
rely on actual product consumption, however, merely brand
exposure, to generate changes in consumer performance, which
echoes work showing the ability of brand primes to cue brand
identity-consistent behavior (Fitzsimons et al., 2008).
Implications
These results extend prior literature on nonconscious brand
exposure in three key ways. First, this work illustrates how
brand exposure can exert double-edged effects on consumer
outcomes; a brand with a strong personality position on certain
dimensions can create both positive and negative effects on
relevant consumer performance metrics. In this article, we
showed that Red Bull's personality connotations of speed,
power, aggression, and recklessness lead to both positive and
negative effects on race performance. This double-sided effect
highlights the need for further exploration into the unconscious
effects of brand exposure and the importance of objective
metrics such as strength and speed. Indeed, as prior work has
suggested that cognitive and verbal-based recall and recognition
measures are ill-fitted for transformative advertising campaigns
(Puto & Wells, 1984), changes in objective behavior may offer
an alternative pathway for transformative ad effects to manifest.
Second, this work shows that brand exposure can affect
objective metrics beyond choice, self-expression, and subjec-
tive performance measures. Indeed, in the current study, the Red
Bull brand exposure showed a clear U-shaped effect on the
objective measure of race time while participants' subjective
observations of branding effects on performance were conflict-
ed and inconsistent. Rather than being confined to subjective or
perceptual effects within consumer behavior, brand exposure
may have much further reaching consumer performance
consequences than first explored. Especially as the brand
exposures in the current study involved no actual or implied
product consumption, the behavioral effects of brands on
consumer behavior may be far more pervasive than most are
aware of.
Third, our work adds to the growing body of research
illustrating how brands can impact consumer behavior whether
the exposure is subliminal, explicit, or implicit (Fransen,
Fennis, Pruyn, & Das, 2008). Even the supraliminal brand
63
exposures of the current work appear to operate on consumer
performance through largely nonconscious channels. Thus, we
may be unaware not only of the methods by which brands affect
our performance and behavior but also of the existence of these
effects at all. Double-sided effects of brand exposure may yield
further insight and new avenues of consumer performance can
be explored. For example, exposure to Volvo branding (which
has strong connotations of safety and security) may alter
consumer's risk profiles to pursue more conservative or
aggressive strategies, which may help or harm the consumer's
performance depending on the scenario at hand.
The pattern of results presented appears especially relevant
in the environments of interactive media, where the line
between brand exposure and brand placebo blurs. A brand paint
job on the consumer's video game racecar has meaning beyond
simple brand exposure; the car may serve as a temporary
possession or part of that consumer's extended self (Belk,
1988). This suggests that brand exposure effects may be
especially powerful for brands that are colocated with objects
under the user's control in interactive media environments.
Would Red Bull brand exposure have a reduced effect if it was
presented on a competitor's car because the object is not under
the consumer's control? Future work might explore whether the
presence of brands within a locus of control may create effects
more congruent with product consumption compared to mere
brand exposure. This may also serve to tease apart the
“spreading activation” cognitive driver of brand priming effects
from the “possessions and the extended self” driver of brand
priming effects within interactive environments, showing how
these potential causal drivers interplay, or which is dominant.
Conclusion
Overall, these results highlight the importance of exploring the
effects of brand exposure on consumer behavior. Brand exposure
can create double-edged outcomes on consumer performance,
with both positive and negative effects arising from a single set of
brand identity associations. These effects may travel through
largely nonconscious pathways outside of conscious awareness
(Bargh & Chartrand, 1999), suggesting that objective perfor-
mance metrics may better capture brand priming effects over
subjective or cognitive measures. As ambient out-of-home
advertising continues to flourish (Klara, 2009), brand collabora-
tions and cobranding attach multiple brands to single objects
(Grossman, 1997), and promotional techniques such as product
placement challenge traditional advertising for marketing dom-
inance (LaFerle & Edwards, 2006), these effects are of growing
importance as the amount of brand exposure increases in
consumers' lives.
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