Effects of exaggerate priming and fluent processing on the evaluation of design

It is a common strategy for some product categories in which design is a key feature, to precede the actual market launch with the exhibition of showpieces that feature the design to be marketed in a highly exaggerated way. Across three experiments we find that attitude toward a target design improves by initially exposing subjects to exaggerate exemplars of the same design, and that this improvement is due to a more effective encoding of the visual information contained in the showpiece caused by exaggeration, and to the subsequent more fluent processing of the target design. The effect is observed for experts. It is also observed for non-experts when the structural alignment between the showpiece and the target is made more salient by means of higher visual redundancy between the two stimuli.