Gender Gap in Retirement Savings

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Kennedy collected 60,000 pages of media coverage about the market for computer workstations developed between 1980 and 1990 and then converted the material into mental maps—or visualizations —of the competition among technology market companies to show which ones had more success creating the market. This led him, he says, to the discovery that forming networks with competitors is the most effective way to get journalists to take you seriously and send your message to the public. Mentioning them in interviews, he says, can benefit the whole market by creating legitimacy. "You're not for real until you have the right critical mass of people saying you're for real," Kennedy says. "It's more than what happens in the lab."

Kennedy is now looking into where there is such a thing as bad press and how visibility can backfire. Business schools, he says, should spend more time educating students on how the media work, and they can do this by supporting and disseminating research like this: "I'm showing that media is an important way to tell people that what you're doing really matters."

Subliminal Smarts

Apple's bold ad campaigns are indelibly printed in consumers' minds, from their famous 1984 "Big Brother" Super Bowl commercial to the "Think Different" campaign of the 1990s. The ads helped the company cultivate an aura of innovation, but can the mere sight of the Apple logo impart more creativity to ordinary viewers?

According to one study, the answer is yes. Researchers Gavan Fitzsimons and Tanya Chartrand of Duke University's Fuqua School of Business and Grainne Fitzsimons of Canada's University of Waterloo found that even the briefest exposure to the Apple logo can make people think more creatively.

In an experiment they divided 341 undergraduates into groups and gave them a visual acuity test during which a box popped up on their computer screen followed by either the Apple or IBM logo. The logos flashed onto the screen so quickly—for about 30 milliseconds—students didn't register them consciously, a form of subliminal advertising. After this exercise, participants were divided into two groups and asked to come up with all of the possible uses they could think of for a brick, beyond building a wall. Those exposed to the Apple logo had an increase of about 15% to 30% in terms of the actual numbers of uses people came up with for the item, compared with groups exposed to the IBM logo. Independent judges who rated the submissions for uniqueness and creativity also awarded significantly higher scores to the Apple-logo group.

Innovation Spurred by the Apple

The results of the exercise, published in the April issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, surprised the researchers in part because the notion of subliminal advertising has largely been discredited since a famous experiment in 1957 by researcher James Vicary was revealed to be fraudulent. "We were a little skeptical because of all this stuff that had been debunked," said Fitzsimons. But new research in the field encouraged the research team to use subliminal advertising in the experiment because it was the strongest test of whether incidental brand exposure could have an impact on a consumer, they said. The researchers subsequently ran the study more than a dozen times, and each time the results were replicated.

The researchers suggest that Apple's brand personality as an innovative company is so strong that people exposed to it, even on an unconscious level, push themselves to be more innovative. It's an image the company has been pushing for more than 30 years and, as a result, "the association between Apple brand and this notion of creativity is strongly held in the consumer's mind," Fitzsimons said.

The researchers recommend that advertisers and marketers use the research to help them shift advertising dollars from traditional TV ads to more "short, incidental exposures", such as Web product placement or weaving brands into the lives of characters in videos games or TV shows. Managers should also reflect more on what type of feelings they want their products to evoke in consumers and build their branding campaign around that concept, as Apple has done. "I think you'd be hard pressed to find a consumer who wouldn't like to be more creative," Fitzsimons said.

Di Meglio is a reporter for BusinessWeek.com in Fort Lee, N.J. Damast is a reporter for BusinessWeek.com.