How Platform Personalization and Goal Framing Shape Incidental Brand Memory: Serendipity and Effort as Encoding Pathways Under Low Attention

This research examines how incidental advertising encounters translate into brand memory on personalized platforms. Across five experiments, results reveal a crossover pattern: under high perceived personalization, proximal goal framing enhances brand memory through perceived serendipity, whereas under low perceived personalization, distal framing strengthens brand memory via cognitive effort. These encounter-level pathways operate prior to evaluation and are moderated by need for cognition, with low–need-for-cognition consumers more sensitive to context–message alignment. By conceptualizing incidental exposure as an encounter-level interpretive process, the study advances advertising theory on how platform context and message framing jointly shape brand memory under low attention.