Washington, Dec 14 : Consumers are likely to identify with a brand that advertises alongside their personal information on Facebook profile, specially if they have high self-esteem, a new study has revealed.

According to study on Journal of Consumer Research, the same ad will have less impact if you view it on a stranger''s page.

"The vast majority of marketing exposures are experienced under conditions of low attention and little cognitive involvement," write authors Andrew W. Perkins of University of Western Ontario and Mark R. Forehand of University of Washington, Seattle).

"The current research demonstrates that brand identification can form even in these low-involvement conditions if the brand is merely presented simultaneously with self-related information," they added.

This concept, called "implicit self-referencing," suggested that consumers don''t need to own, choose, or endorse a brand to identify with it. This occurs because most consumers possess high self-esteem and when brand concepts are linked to consumers'' self-concepts, some of those positive feelings rub off onto the brands.

In one experiment, the authors asked participants to sort fictitious brand names with terms related to "self" or "other", their attitudes toward the "self" brands were more positive.

In another experiment, they found that the effect was stronger for individuals who had higher self-esteem. And in a third study, they demonstrated that the effect occurs when brands are simply presented near consumers'' personal content on a social networking site.

Participants were instructed to compare the interfaces of two social networking sites- Facebook and hi5, while fictitious car ads rotated through banner ads.

According to the study, the participants reported that they much preferred brands that had appeared, without them being conscious of it, on their own pages. (ANI)