Emotional Response to Advertising (Television)

332 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1985.An extensive review of the psychology literature is undertaken in the search to better understand consumers' emotional response to advertising. The purpose of the research is twofold: (1) to identify ads which elicit a high degree of "emotional response" from the viewer, and (2) to discriminate the difference between ads that perform well on this dimension of effectiveness and those that do not.While focusing on emotion in the viewer rather than in the ad content, an operational definition of emotion is tested. An analysis scheme is applied to a pool of 50 commercials using the retrospective verbatim protocols of 1498 respondents after forced-exposure to commercials. Three different types of intensity of emotional response (meaningful, empathic, and descriptive) and three basic kinds of emotions (energizing, hedonic and state anticipation) are delineated. Analysis of how emotional response interacts with other variables, such as response length, liking of the ad, and recall measures is also presented.Two important findings result from this study. First, two ways of classifying feeling responses to commercials are developed, which can definitely be found in individuals' retrospective verbatim responses. Second, these two ways of classifying individuals' emotional responses (a) show differences between groups of commercials, and (b) are different than traditional responses to advertising.Overall, meaningful and empathic emotional response appear to require more depth of processing because they are self-relevant and experiential. Descriptive emotional response resembles recall since the individual's response indicates recognition of emotions portrayed in the commercial. Also, although three kinds of basic emotions are delineated, this sample of 50 commercials elicited more state anticipation emotions, followed by hedonic and energizing emotions.A strong positive relationship is found between the descriptive level of emotional response and such traditional measures of advertising as the adjective checklist, brand recall, and attitude to the ad. Meaningful and empathic emotional responses are more likely to be associated with use of personal connectors and attitude to the ad.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD