Emotional Integration and Advertising Effectiveness:Case of Perfumes Advertising

Abstract

This paper examines emotions in advertising, its effects and functioning. Using an interview-based experiment on 256 participants, we found that emotions perceived during an advertising exposure could play an important role in eliciting responses towards the ad and the brand. However, this process is true provided that consumers associate the perceived emotion to the exposed brand or its consumption experience. Furthermore, we have identified efficiency differences between magazine ads, depending on how they visually describe emotions. In particular, we study emotional integration in advertising, i.e. salience of emotions expressed towards the ad, the presence of core brand information and clarity of the advertising message about the hedonic attributes of consumption. Interestingly, the impact of the staging process of emotions is moderated by respondents-specific variables, including their need for emotion, tolerance for ambiguity, their need for structure and need for cognition.