A research-backed exploration of why being seen matters more than being good, and what the academic evidence actually says.

The Uncomfortable Truth

There is an uncomfortable truth at the heart of marketing that most practitioners would rather not confront. The brand that consumers see most often is the brand they will prefer most often, regardless of product quality, positioning sophistication, or the elegance of a creative strategy.

This is not opinion. It is one of the most replicated findings in behavioral science, supported by over 200 studies across cultures, categories, and decades. And yet, in boardrooms around the world, "visibility" is still treated as a vanity metric ,something to report on but not to build a strategy around.

This article is my attempt to organise the academic evidence and change that perception. It draws on peer-reviewed research from psychology, marketing science, neuroscience, and attention economics to make a simple argument: visibility is not a byproduct of good marketing. It is the precondition for it.

1. The mere exposure effect: How familiarity creates preference

In 1968, psychologist Robert Zajonc conducted a deceptively simple experiment. He showed participants a series of novel stimuli, nonsense words designed to sound Turkish and simulated Chinese ideographs, varying the number of exposures from zero to twenty-five times. Participants were then asked to rate whether each stimulus meant something good or bad.

The results were unequivocal: the more frequently a stimulus had been shown, the more positively it was rated , even though participants had no idea what the symbols meant. Zajonc had demonstrated that mere repeated exposure to a stimulus is sufficient to enhance attitudes toward it. In later work (Kunst-Wilson & Zajonc, 1980), this effect was shown to persist even at subliminal exposure durations, as brief as 5 milliseconds, where participants could not consciously recognise what they had seen, yet still preferred the familiar stimuli.

The finding has since been replicated over 200 times across stimuli ranging from faces to sounds to geometric shapes (Bornstein, 1989).

Zajonc called this the Mere Exposure Effect: the phenomenon whereby repeated exposure to a stimulus ,even below conscious awareness, generates preference for that stimulus. His original study has since been replicated over 200 times across different stimuli, cultures, and conditions. It is, as Kahneman would later note in Thinking, Fast and Slow, one of the most robust findings in experimental psychology.

But why does it work?

Daniel Kahneman, in Thinking, Fast and Slow, explains the mechanism through cognitive fluency: the brain processes familiar stimuli faster, and this processing ease is experienced as a positive feeling. As Zajonc himself argued, and Kahneman reports, a stimulus that appears repeatedly without negative consequence becomes a safety signal, and safety feels good. Good feels like preference.

The implication for brands is profound: you do not need to persuade first. You need to be present first. Preference follows. Stocks with pronounceable ticker symbols (like KAR or LUNMOO) outperform those with difficult ones (like PXG or RDO). Companies with fluent names are perceived by investors as likely to deliver higher returns. And brands that appear frequently in a consumer's environment, even peripherally, build preference without the consumer ever making a conscious evaluation.

This is not about persuasion. It is about familiarity. And familiarity, the research tells us, is the gateway to trust.

2. Mental Availability: The Real Driver of Market Share

If the Mere Exposure Effect explains why familiar brands are preferred, Byron Sharp 's concept of mental availabilityand physical availability explains why they are purchased.

Sharp, professor of marketing science and director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute ,the world's largest centre for marketing research ,argues in How Brands Grow that brands grow primarily by increasing penetration: acquiring more buyers. The mechanism for this is not differentiation — his research shows that the vast majority of buyers do not perceive their chosen brand as meaningfully different from alternatives. Instead, brands grow by being easy to mind and easy to find: what Sharp calls mental and physical availability.

​Jenni Romaniuk and Sharp (2016) define mental availability as "the probability that a buyer will notice, recognise and/or think of a brand in buying situations," dependent on "the quality and quantity of memory structures related to the brand." Physical availability, being present and easy to buy in as many purchase situations as possible, is the essential companion to mental availability. As Sharp writes: "advertising falls flat when the brand isn't physically available, and brands sit on shelves when consumers don't notice them."

Jenni Romaniuk extended this work through the concept of Category Entry Points (CEPs) , the specific cues, needs, or occasions that trigger a consumer to think about a product category. A brand's growth depends on how many of these entry points it is linked to in memory, and how strongly.

The practical implication: marketers should invest not only in making their brand easy to recall across many buying situations, but also in ensuring it is easy to buy when that recall occurs. The brand that gets remembered is the brand that gets bought, but only if it can also be found.

3. Distinctive Brand Assets: The 0.01% Challenge

But mental availability alone is not enough. A brand must also be recognisable in the chaotic sensory environment of a purchase situation.

Research from Unravel Neuromarketing's Brand Asset Guide 2025 quantifies the challenge: our brains filter out 99.99% of all stimuli in purchasing environments. Only brands with strong distinctive assets, visual, auditory, or sensory cues that are uniquely and instantly linked to the brand, break through this filter.

Distinctive assets include logos, colours, taglines, jingles, mascots, packaging shapes, and even scents. The Nike Swoosh, the Mastercard circles, the Aflac Duck ,these are not merely creative choices. They are memory structures that allow the brand to be identified without the brand name even being articulated.

The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute´s Report 52 on distinctive assets warns that these elements take years to build and should never be abandoned lightly. Frequent rebrands, logo changes, or abandonment of established visual identities destroy accumulated memory structures that cannot be easily rebuilt. The larger the memory network of your brand, the easier it is for new associations to attach to it,a compounding effect that rewards consistency over novelty.

4. Share of Voice: The 50-Year Rule That Still Holds

If visibility drives familiarity and familiarity drives preference and mental availability drives purchase, then the question becomes: how much visibility is enough?

The answer comes from one of the most enduring empirical relationships in advertising: the Share of Voice (SOV) / Share of Market (SOM) rule.

First documented by James O. Peckham at AC Nielsen in the 1970s, extended by John Philip Jones in his landmark 1990 Harvard Business Review article, and extensively validated by Les Binet and Peter Field through their analysis of the IPA Databank (1998–2018), the Share of Voice rule is one of the most robust findings in marketing science: brands that set their Share of Voice above their Share of Market tend to grow; those that set it below tend to shrink.

The rate at which they grow or shrink is proportional to their Excess Share of Voice (ESOV) , the difference between SOV and SOM. This rule has held for over 50 years across categories and through enormous changes in the media landscape.

Binet and Field's Effectiveness in Context presents data from the IPA Databank (1998–2016) showing this relationship holds across categories, brand sizes, and time periods. Critically, they also demonstrate that bigger brands enjoy economies of scale , they can maintain market share with SOV slightly below SOM, while smaller brands need to invest disproportionately in voice to maintain their position.

The relationship extends to B2B markets. Research from the LinkedIn The B2B Institute found that in B2B categories, every 10 percentage points of ESOV generates approximately 0.7 percentage points of market share growth per year, a slightly higher efficiency rate than the B2C average of approximately 0.5, likely because many B2B categories remain underinvested in brand building.

5. The Attention Economy: Viewable Does Not Mean Viewed

Understanding that visibility matters raises a critical measurement question: what counts as being "seen"?

Herbert Simon anticipated this challenge in 1971 when he wrote: "A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." More than fifty years later, the advertising industry is still catching up to his insight.

​Mike Follett at Lumen Research, working with eye-tracking data from TVision and media cost data from Ebiquity, has created the most comprehensive picture yet of what "attention" actually means in advertising. His research reveals a crucial distinction: viewable does not mean viewed.

The advertising industry has invested heavily in "viewability" metrics ,whether an ad was technically on-screen for a minimum duration. But Lumen's data shows that even "viewable" ads are frequently not looked at. Combining three measures ,the percentage of ads that could be seen (viewability), the percentage of those that were actually looked at (view rate), and the average eyes-on dwell time ,Lumen calculates Attentive Seconds Per Thousand impressions (APM), a measure of how much real human attention each media generates.

The findings are striking. A 30-second TV ad, when viewed, generates approximately 13.8 seconds of actual attention. A 15-second YouTube ad generates around 5 seconds. An Instagram Stories ad generates just 1.7 seconds. But the cost differences between these media on a traditional CPM basis do not reflect these attention gaps, meaning that some media are dramatically overpriced relative to the attention they actually deliver, while others are underpriced.

Follett's conclusion challenges one of the industry's core assumptions: we are not buying media. We are buying attention. And we should start measuring, and pricing, it that way.

6. When Brands Go Dark: The Cost of Disappearing

Perhaps the most compelling evidence for the strategic importance of visibility comes not from brands that invest in it, but from brands that stop.

A 2023 study published in the Journal of Advertising Research by Phua, Hartnett, Beal, Trinh, and Kennedy at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute examined what happens to brands that cease advertising for a year or more. Their study, "When Brands Go Dark," documented cases across 22 product categories and found a consistent pattern of decline.

On average, brands that stopped advertising saw their market share decline by 10% after one year, 20% after two years, and 28% after three years, relative to their last advertised year.

Importantly, the study found that all kinds of brands stop advertising, not just small or struggling ones. Among the cessation cases studied, 29% were growing brands, 34% were stable, and 37% were declining. The lesson is clear: no brand is immune from the consequences of going dark.

The authors note that advertising effects do carry forward for a time and that other business activities contribute to performance, which explains why the decline is gradual rather than immediate. But the trajectory is unmistakable: without sustained visibility, even strong brands erode.

7. Share of Search: Visibility's Real-Time Proxy

If Share of Voice measures what brands invest, and Share of Market measures what they earn, Share of Search bridges the two, measuring what consumers actually think about.

Research by Les Binet, developed alongside James Hankins and the IPA Think Tank, introduced Share of Search as a practical proxy: using Google Trends data to measure a brand's share of organic search queries within its category. The research demonstrated that changes in Share of Search precede changes in Share of Market, making it a leading indicator of brand health, one that can be calculated by anyone with access to Google Trends, at zero cost.

The practical value is significant. While market share data is expensive, slow, and often restricted to large enterprises, Share of Search can be calculated by anyone with access to Google Trends. It democratises brand measurement, enabling even small brands to track their competitive position and diagnose strategic problems before they show up in sales data.

Subsequent research by the IPA group and partners like MyTelescope has validated the metric across multiple categories and geographies, establishing it as a practical complement to traditional brand tracking.

8. The New Frontier: AI Visibility

Everything discussed so far applies to a world where consumers discover brands through traditional media, search engines, and physical retail environments. But a new frontier is emerging.

Research from Aggarwal, Murahari, and colleagues at Princeton University and IIT Delhi, published in their paper "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization," demonstrates that generative AI systems (like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews) represent a fundamentally new visibility challenge for brands.

Unlike traditional search engines, which direct users to websites, generative engines synthesise answers directly, potentially reducing organic traffic to brand-owned properties. The researchers found that visibility in generative engine responses could be improved by up to 40% through specific content optimisation strategies: adding relevant statistics, incorporating credible citations, and including authoritative quotes.

Notably, traditional SEO tactics like keyword stuffing performed poorly in generative engines. What improved visibility was the credibility and richness of content, a finding that aligns with the broader theme of this article: it is not about gaming systems but about building genuine, substantive presence.

For marketers, this means that brand visibility strategy must now extend beyond traditional media, search, and social. It must include how, and whether, a brand appears in AI-generated answers to the questions consumers are beginning to ask.

9. The Long and the Short of Visibility

Binet and Field's seminal work The Long and the Short of It established that effective marketing requires a balance between long-term brand building and short-term sales activation. Their IPA analysis shows that brand-building effects, which operate primarily through emotion and broad reach, take over as the primary driver of growth after six months, while activation effects peak quickly and decay rapidly.

This framework maps directly onto visibility. Short-term activation requires visibility at the point of purchase, being present in search results, appearing in retargeted ads, showing up in comparison tools. Long-term brand building requires visibility in the broader cultural and media environment, being seen and remembered even by people who are not currently in the market.

Their analysis of the IPA Databank revealed that the optimal balance is roughly 60% brand building to 40% sales activation for most categories, though this varies significantly by sector. Financial services, for example, benefits from a much heavier brand split (80:20), while B2B markets sit closer to an even split (46:54).

The principle, however, is universal: sustained visibility investment builds the mental structures that make short-term activation more efficient. Cut the brand investment, and activation has to work harder for diminishing returns.

Conclusion: Visibility Is the Strategy

The evidence presented here converges on a single conclusion.

Visibility is not a vanity metric. It is not a nice-to-have. It is not a proxy for something more important.

Visibility, understood as the combined effect of exposure, attention, mental availability, distinctive recognition, and sustained presence, is the foundational mechanism through which brands grow.

Zajonc proved that exposure creates preference. Kahneman explained why through cognitive fluency. Sharp demonstrated that mental and physical availability, not perceived differentiation, drive market share. Binet and Field showed that Share of Voice predicts growth, and that the balance between brand building and activation determines long-term profitability. Follett and Lumen proved that not all impressions are equal — attention is what actually counts.

For any brand, any business, in any category, the question is not whether visibility matters. The question is whether you are investing in it systematically enough.

This is the first in a series exploring the science of visibility and attention. Each post will take one research finding and translate it into practical marketing implications.

Sources

• Zajonc, R. B. (1968). "Attitudinal effects of mere exposure." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 9(2), 1–27.
• Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Chapters 5–6.
• Sharp, B. (2010). How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don't Know. Oxford University Press.
• Romaniuk, J. & Sharp, B. (2016). "Mental availability: The key to brand growth." Journal of Advertising Research, 56(1), 27–31.
• Binet, L. & Field, P. (2013). The Long and the Short of It: Balancing Short and Long-Term Marketing Strategies. IPA.
• Binet, L. & Field, P. (2018). Effectiveness in Context. IPA.
• LinkedIn B2B Institute / Binet, L. (2019). The 5 Principles of Growth in B2B Marketing.
• Follett, M. (2021). "The true cost of advertising attention." WARC Exclusive. Lumen Research / Ebiquity / TVision.
• Phua, P., Hartnett, N., Beal, V., Trinh, G. & Kennedy, R. (2023). "When Brands Go Dark: A Replication and Extension." Journal of Advertising Research, 63(2), 172–184.
• Binet, L. (2020). "Share of Search as a Predictive Measure." IPA / adam&eveDDB.
• Aggarwal, P., Murahari, V., et al. (2024). "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization." Princeton University / IIT Delhi. arXiv:2311.09735.
• Unravel Neuromarketing (2025). The Ultimate Brand Asset Guide.
• Ehrenberg-Bass Institute (2018). Report 52: Building Distinctive Brand Assets.

Simon, H. A. (1971). "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World." Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest.
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