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The purpose of this paper is to contribute to research on the cognitive capacity theory. The paper aims to examine the effects of advertising recipients' positive and negative associations, that is their memories and fantasies evoked by the advertising stimulus, on brand attitude for advertisements that require little effort to process; focusing on positively framed advertisements.

This paper suggests a model on the effects of positive and negative association on brand attitude and tests it using partial least square. Advertisements that are easy to process were selected in a pre‐test.

It is shown that if advertisements are easy to process, the effects of consumers' associations depend on their favourableness: positive associations have a positive effect and negative associations have a negative effect on brand attitude. These findings are an extension of knowledge on the effects of associations, because for informational advertisements previous research has demonstrated that associations generally have a negative effect on brand attitude.

Results of this study suggest that evoking positive memories and fantasies in the target group enhances the effectiveness of advertisements that require little effort to process.

Effects of associations on brand attitude have not been studied for advertisements that require little effort to process. Previous studies have not distinguished positive and negative associations; this study analyses their effects separately.