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.
Study 1: From emotions to likability
Leonardo Nuzzo, a student of our business psychology program, explored the influence of emotional advertising on the consumers’ subjective likability while using the attitude transfer model (Yoo & MacInnis, 2005), which is commonly recognized in advertising effectiveness research. The following shows the adapted research model to this context.
Study participants were shown different video commercials from the automotive or food industry and subsequently answered an online questionnaire. The commercials appealed to viewers because of a variety of aspects, such as fun or story-telling. Yet, all 24 video commercials highlighted well-known brands within their respective industry (e.g., BMW in automotive, or Haribo in food industry). Data from 123 respondents was recorded who were between 18 and 30 years old (pre-defined target group) and mainly students at our institution.
Main findings
- Both, the emotional valence and arousal are related to the attitude towards the commercial: recipients evaluated commercials which generated more positive and intense feelings as better.
- The relationships between the emotional arousal and attitude as well as emotional valence and attitude are mediated by the credibility. Thus, emotional advertising increases the credibility which is perceived as more positive by consumers.
Study 2: From emotions to likability to virality
Danica Santos, another business psychology student at our university, investigated the effect of emotional commercials compared to informative advertisements. Specifically, the subjective liking as well as the willingness to share the advertisement on social media (virality) was being examined. It was expected that consumers not only like the emotional advertising better, but also are more likely to share it.
Participants of this online experiment were first shown an emotion-neutral informative advertisement and subsequently one of four emotional video commercials that varied in valence (positive vs. negative) and arousal (high vs. low). More specifically, video advertisements about an insurance company were created based on commercials which were identified as suitable in a preliminary study.
In total, 159 Respondents took part in the survey, of which the majority were female (76%) students (80%) with a mean age of 25 years (range: 18 – 58 years). Approximately 88% of participants reported using social media every day of the week. The overall willingness to share content on social media channels averaged 5.21 on a scale of 1 to 7 (SD=1.56).
Main findings
- As in the first study, the subjective liking of a commercial is impacted by the emotional arousal and valence.
- In addition, the willingness to share is significantly higher for emotional commercials than for informative commercials, i.e. high arousal ads had higher virality than low arousal ads.
- Surprisingly, negative commercials not only achieved greater subjective liking, but also increased the willingness to share them more than positive commercials.
- The relationship between the arousal of an advertising spot and the willingness to share is partially mediated by the subjective liking. Thus, a positive perception of the consumer also has a positive influence on the willingness to share an advertising on social media.
- Usage of social media had no influence on the virality of the commercials.
Conclusion
The research described in this post demonstrates that emotional content has a stronger advertising effect because consumers prefer to watch and share it on social media (viral marketing). Hence, the following connection was identified:
While the first study found that emotional advertising indeed has a significant impact on the consumers’ liking, it also confirmed a mediating effect of credibility on the relationship between emotional advertising and likability (see also one of our earlier posts about the credibility of influencers and trust in online product reviews). Furthermore, as the second study highlighted, emotional advertising is more likely to be shared on social media than informative advertising. More specifically, in the context of insurance advertising, negative advertising not only leads to greater subjective liking than positive advertising, but also to a greater willingness to share it.
Emotional advertising is more appealing to consumers, partly because consumers perceive it as more credible. Possibly, this is due to the fact that, according to the Elaboration Likelihood Model (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986), consumers tend to follow the peripheral route when it comes to advertising and do not process information on a deeper level. For companies, the identification of the specific emotional needs of (potential) customers plays a fundamental role in marketing to create appealing emotional stimuli in advertisements.
References
Levenson, R. W. (2011). Basic Emotion Questions. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1754073911410743
O’Shaughnessy, J., O’Shaughnessy, N. J. (2022). The Marketing Power of Emotion. Oxford University Press
Petty, R. E. & Cacioppo, J. T. (1986). Communication and persuasion: central and peripheral routes to attitude change. Berlin, Germany: Springer-Verlag. p. 4. ISBN 978-0387963440.
Yoo, C. & MacInnis, D. (2005). The brand attitude formation process of emotional and informational ads. Journal of Business Research, 58(10), 1397–1406. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2005.03.011
