The Mere Exposure Effect in Marketing: First, Be Known

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If you were to buy a car tomorrow, which brand would you buy?

If you actually buy a car tomorrow, the brand you just thought of has an advantage over others.

Because you already know that brand.

While exposure is not the only reason for buying things, it’s a crucial part of the buying process. 

In other words, we don’t buy everything we’re exposed to, but we’re exposed to everything we buy before we buy them.

This is why the mere exposure effect is a critical part of marketing strategy.

In a moment, I’ll explore the mere exposure effect and how you can exploit it for your marketing campaigns.

What is the mere exposure effect?

The mere exposure effect is the tendency to prefer people or things you’re familiar with. The effect is more likely when there’s no preexisting negative bias towards the object.

Even when there’s no conscious recognition of the object, the mere exposure effect still influences people.

The effect was first observed by psychologist Robert Zajonc in 1968.

One popular example of the mere exposure effect is that you’ll likely be attracted to someone you spend a lot of time around compared to someone you rarely see.

That’s why most relationships start from obscurity and move to closeness. One key ingredient in this process is the continuous exposure of two people to each other.

Beyond personal relationships, the mere exposure effect is a critical element of marketing.

We’ll dive into how it applies to marketing your products effectively.

Exposure is the foundation of most marketing campaigns

Why is exposure so important in marketing?

Buying anything is a risk. 

You can spend your hard-earned money on things that deliver no value.

To avoid this, you want to be reasonably sure before spending on things.

This is where exposure comes in.

Exposure de-risks purchases for buyers.

Here are four ways exposure is critical to marketing campaigns:

• Repetition strengthens awareness: As people see your brand multiple times, they become more aware of it. Repeated exposure strengthens your audience’s memory of your brand.
• Exposure builds affinity and trust: As people see your brand multiple times, they tend to like and trust it. This trust also extends to whatever product your brand sells.
• Helps prospects judge a product: As prospects become more exposed to your product, they get information to judge whether your product meets their needs. This helps buyers make their purchasing decisions.
• Addresses objections: When people want to buy, they have common objections like pricing, product quality, and returns on investment. Repeated exposure helps to address these objections.

Generally, the mere exposure effect strengthens the idea of quantity of messaging. You want your prospects to see your brand regularly so that they remember your product when it’s time to buy.

If mere exposure is so important to marketing campaigns, how can you take advantage of it to sell more products? 

How to take advantage of the mere exposure effect in marketing

Here are four types of marketing campaigns that take advantage of the mere exposure effect:

Brand awareness

With AI stealing website traffic, brand awareness has become even more important.

Why?

One, people who know your brand can come directly to your website for whatever information or product they want.

Two, people can use your brand name in their search terms. According to Tim Soulo, Ahrefs data revealed that 36.9% of all Google’s US searches are branded. 

People who put your brand name in a search term are more likely to visit your website and buy your product.

Building a strong brand is a great way to protect your business from fluctuations in other marketing platforms.

Here are four common channels to run brand awareness campaigns:

• Blog posts: You can create TOFU, BOFU, and MOFU content to attract and educate thousands of prospects. During this process, visitors will get to know your products.
• Social media posts: Create social media posts to reach people interested in your industry topics. Beyond that, encourage employees to create content about your brand on social media.
• YouTube channel: YouTube videos can help you reach people who prefer video content. And as the second largest search engine, YouTube is a platform to reach the right people.
• Search and social media ads: Platforms like Google and Facebook help you reach millions of people to achieve your goals. Select brand awareness as your campaign goal.

With successful brand awareness campaigns, you can reach thousands of ideal prospects. And when these prospects are ready to buy, your brand will popup in their minds.

Influencer marketing

No matter how big your brand is, you can’t reach everybody. But you can extend your reach through the right influencers.

These are influencers who have built authority and big followings in your industry.

With influencer marketing, they can expose your brand to more people. 

Then, you can leverage an influencer’s authority to build a positive image for your business.

That said, you have to collaborate with the right influencers to gain all these benefits.

You can start with the influencers you already know. For example, if you follow some influencers on Instagram, you can reach out to them first.

Beyond that, influencer marketing tools like Hypr by Julius help you find influencers based on industry, country, engagement, and other metrics. 

Once you have a list of influencers, reach out to them about collaborating. This includes discussions about your campaign type, campaign duration, and payment structure.

After concluding discussions, launch your influencer campaigns and track your results.

Influencer marketing can help you leverage the mere exposure effect, especially on social media.

Collaborate with the right influencers, and prospects will see your brand and products regularly.

Retargeting ads

Retargeting ads attract people who have visited your website at least once. You can even target people based on the pages they visited or actions they took.

The advantage you get with retargeting ads is that recipients already have a little knowledge of your brand. What you want to do is expose them more to your brand to build affinity. 

While most people use retargeting ads to promote sales offers, you can also use it to increase brand exposure.

For example, you can promote new product features, studies, or achievements to past website visitors.

This creates more positive exposure for your brand.

Social proof

Combining social proof and exposure is like adding power to a jet engine.

When you add social proof to your marketing campaigns, you’re reaching more people to show them the love your brand already attracts.

If some of your customers already love your products, a prospect will believe you must be doing something right.

Here are 3 ways to leverage social proof:

• User-generated content (UGC): these are posts created by your customers, especially on social media. You can feature UGC on your accounts to attract more of your ideal customers.
• Testimonials: These explain how customers got value from your product. Here, customers can talk about their experiences before and after using your products. 
• Case studies: These dive deep into the results customers achieve with your product. Case studies include metrics of a customer’s results and how your product helped.

Social proof not only gives you exposure but also positive exposure that can influence people to buy your products.

Examples of mere exposure effect in marketing

Coca Cola

Whether you’re driving on the highway, watching TV, or browsing the web on your smartphone, a Coca-Cola ad is waiting for you.

Even though you may be unaware of these ads, your subconscious registers them.

And when next you’re thirsty for a soft drink, Coca-Cola is the first name that pops into your mind.

Google

Google is so popular that it’s a term in the dictionary for internet searches.

But beyond search, Google offers other services like ads, workspace, and cloud.

Google runs many ads to create exposure for these services.

Grammarly

Grammarly wants to help you write better.

But to reach all possible users, the brand runs ads that mirror its users’ work situations.

One thing I love about its ads is their different creatives. This helps to prevent ad fatigue in their audience.

Shein

Shein has taken advantage of influencer marketing on Instagram and TikTok to build exposure for its products.

With these campaigns, its potential customers see its products every day. 

In return, the brand is on top of buyers’ minds when they need to buy clothes.

You’ll find even more examples of the mere exposure effect once you observe your environment. These include ads on the highway, product placement in TV shows, and sponsored blog posts.

Can exposure be too much?

Things are rarely black and white. And there are nuances to the mere exposure effect too.

After all, it’s called mere exposure effect and not endless exposure effect.

This means the mere exposure effect can fall victim to diminishing returns. As the exposure becomes too much, it can have less effect on people.

One way to prevent this is to create new campaigns regularly. With this, you can add novelty to the exposure to ensure people don’t get bored.

Another problem that can happen with the mere exposure effect is a negative bias towards the object.

If someone already has a negative bias towards an object, more exposure can increase the negative bias.

You don’t want to increase your exposure at a time people hate your brand.

Conclusion

Exposure alone is insufficient to sell a product. But no product can be sold without exposure.

That’s why even companies like Coca-Cola and Google continue to run marketing campaigns aimed at exposure.

They understand that you’re only as popular as the number of people who use your product.

Your business should always be in the minds of your potential buyers.

When you achieve this, you’ve already taken a step ahead of your competitors.