An investigation of the affective response : applications to advertising communications

The importance of attitude toward the advertisement as a mediator of overall brand evaluation has become of great interest to marketing scholars, recently. Prior to this time, it was thought that brand beliefs were the primary contributors to brand evaluation. The circumstances under which ad attitude will be a contributor to overall brand evaluation are uncertain. Some marketing researchers theorize that attitude toward the ad should be most important in determining brand attitude when a strong affective response to the advertisement is produced. However, there is little or no empirical evidence to support this hypothesis. The major emphasis of this research was to determine what factors gave rise to affect and further, how affect influenced one's behavior. Thus, the basic purpose of this research was to define affect, identify advertising stimulus factors that produced affect and to examine how these stimulus factors related to the other variables in an information processing framework. The theoretical underpinnings of this research had multiple sources. Psychological studies on emotion, as well as some consumer behavior literature on moods and likeability of ads provided the background for this study. A process model of how specific stimuli led to an affective response was proposed from the research on emotion and major portions of this proposed model were empirically tested. In the research section, ten major hypotheses were stated concerning relationships within the proposed model and operationally defined.. The empirical test of this model was conducted by way of 2 x 2 x 2 factorial experimental design with two levels of two stimulus factors thought to produce the affective response as treatments. The sample consisted of 240 MBA students from a large Urban Southwestern University. [...]