How Companies Use Our Emotions to Win Us Over.

SOURCE: pinterest.com

The economic principle I’m exploring is “People generally respond to incentives in predictable ways”.

My research question to help me study the economic principle is “Do people generally respond better to positive or negative emotions in advertisements?“

The article published in The Journal of Consumer Research titled “Positive and Negative Messages in Advertising” demonstrates this economic principle by arguing/showing that people respond to emotion regardless of the message, and that positive/negative emotions work best in different situations.

First, Robert Heath from the University of Bath found that the message of an ad is far less important than its emotional appeal. In his experiment, he rated the emotional appeal of 23 different TV commercials and asked 200 people to rate the effectiveness of the ad. He found that ads with high emotional content significantly increased their positive attitude towards the product, which ads with little to no emotional content made no difference in swaying the viewers. The implication of these findings, Dr. Heath states, is that ¨advertisements inducing positive emotional reactions appear to be more effective and may also reduce peoples' awareness of being influenced by marketing.¨ Since the message does not appear to matter as much in consumers decisions to buy a product after viewing an advertisement, Dr. Heath claims that, "it's not what you say, but the way that you say it, that gets results."

Secondly, the researchers found that what makes the difference in effectiveness of positive vs. negative emotional advertisements is time. In an experiment conducted by researchers from Stanford University, University of California Berkeley, and the University of Chicago, participants were supposed to consider purchasing a vacation to Europe either last minute or months in advance. They found that the last-minute trip planners were willing to pay $178 more (on average) when presented with a negative ad (Don't get stuck at home! Don't get ripped off! etc.) versus a positive ad (Get the best deal! Get a memorable vacation! etc.). On the other hand, the people planning the trip months in advance were willing to pay $165 more (on average) when presented with the positive ad versus the negative ad.

The conclusions of this research leave us with two ideas: Emotions in advertising are key in getting people to buy product, and negative ads work better when you're in a time constraint, and positive ads work better when you buy ahead of time.

In my next blog post I will research the question: How does the imagery in an advertisement affect its persuasive ability?