Current market conditions and today’s information overload require advertisers to drastically change their strategies. In fact, informative advertising is increasingly losing its effectiveness. An alternative approach is emotional marketing (O’Shaughnessy & O’Shaughnessy, 2002), which aims at influencing consumers’ buying decisions by advertising on an emotional level. Emotions have the ability to impact thoughts, behaviours, and other fundamental processes (Levenson, 2011). In addition to the arousing effect, emotions also have other positive effects, such as improved reception of the advertising message or generally an increase in consumers’ advertising acceptance. Viral marketing takes this advertising approach one step further, as it relates to consumers voluntarily forwarding advertisements on social media. This post summarizes two studies which explored the effect of emotions on the likability and ultimately virality of online advertisements.
