The interaction between consumers’ communication style and arousal on persuasion and variety-seeking

In this dissertation, I explored the interactive and main effects of the three advertising strategies (i.e., repetition-variation in advertising presentation, scarcity messages, and sex appeal) and consumers’ communication style on attitudes, purchase intention, and variety-seeking behavior. The three advertising strategies were expected to affect consumers’ arousal through changes in advertising presentation, product desirability, and psychological responses respectively. The focus is on the situation in which ads for competitive brands of the same product category are displayed. Drawing upon literature on the low-and-high context communication style and the influence of advertising context on elaboration type, the persuasiveness of ads should increase when advertising content and advertising context facilitate consumers’ information processing, which is influenced by their communication style. According to the optimum stimulation level (OSL) theory, consumers adjust their arousal level through variety-seeking behavior. The three advertising strategies, thus, can influence consumers’ variety-seeking via arousal that ads provide. However, the amount of arousal that consumers obtain from ads should vary according to the way they process advertising messages. The differences in arousal level, in turn, influence consumers’ variety-seeking behavior. Three experimental studies were conducted to examine the propositions mentioned previously. Study 1 examined the influence of repetition-variation in advertising presentation and consumers’ communication style. Study 2 examined the influence of scarcity messages and consumers’ communication style. Study 3 examined the influence of sex appeal and consumers’ communication style. The findings indicated a positive relationship between consumers’ communication style and the effectiveness of ads when all brands were novel to consumers and the ads were repeatedly presented regardless of changes in ad presentation (Study 1). Also, the persuasiveness of ads in a competitive advertising environment increased as the consumers adopted a higher-context communication style when all brands were new to consumers no matter whether the ads contained scarcity messages or not (Study 2). The relationship between consumers’ communication style and their attitude toward the products and purchase intention disappeared when the brands were familiar to consumers and the ads were presented with sex appeal (Study 3). However, a negative relationship between consumers’ communication style and attitude toward the ads with sex appeal was found. In terms of variety-seeking, the findings of this dissertation contradict prior studies, which postulate that consumers seek less variety as they obtain greater arousal from the environment. The results revealed a positive relationship between level of arousal and variety-seeking behavior. In addition, when ads were shown repeatedly without variation, consumers were likely to seek greater variety in products as they adopted a higher-context communication style. Moreover, a negative relationship between consumers’ communication style and varietyseeking was reported when the ads were shown irrespective of sex appeal. Overall, this dissertation contributes to a body of knowledge in an advertising field by applying literature on communication style, cognitive processing, and variety-seeking to expand the understanding of consumers’ attitudes and behaviors