اثر سن، نیاز به شناخت، و شدت عاطفی بر اثربخشی تبلیغات

This paper explores how individual characteristics of age, need for cognition (NFC), and affective intensity (AI) interact with each other and with advertising appeal frames (i.e., rational, positive-emotional, negative-emotional) to influence ad attitudes, involvement, and recall. The mixed design study reveals that younger adults recall emotional messages, especially negative ones, better than rational ones, but recall does not differ for older adults across appeal frames. Older adults prefer rational and positive messages to negative-emotional messages but ad attitudes do not differ among younger adults across appeal frames. Finally, age interacts with AI, but not NFC, to influence ad responsiveness. Both age and AI influence ad attitudes such that older adults exhibit the most positive ad attitudes across all appeal frames.

Consumers today are bombarded with marketing messages and the sheer abundance of these messages causes marketers to be increasingly concerned with advertising effectiveness. Consequently, researchers exploring advertising effectiveness have identified message framing as a factor contributing to persuasion (e.g., Chandran and Menon, 2004). How ad information is presented, or framed, influences consumers' willingness to attend to and remember ad content. Marketing messages can be framed in various ways (Bagozzi et al., 1999). For example, rationally-framed messages provide information to persuade through appeals to recipients' thoughts. Alternatively, emotionally-framed messages attempt to persuade through appeals to emotions. Emotional appeals can be further differentiated in terms of valence: positive (e.g., joy, warmth, happiness) or negative (e.g., fear, guilt, worry). Research shows that both thoughts and feelings contribute to advertising effectiveness (Edell and Burke, 1987). However, conditions under which thoughts versus positive or negative feelings are more important for advertising effectiveness are not fully understood. This research addresses this issue by exploring moderating effects of three specific individual differences on the relationship between message framing and ad effectiveness. Specifically, this work explores the interaction of age, need for cognition (NFC), and affective intensity (AI) with advertising message frames (positive-emotional, negative-emotional, and rational) to influence ad attitudes (Aad), ad involvement (Iad), and ad recall (Rad).

This study has explored the moderating effects of age, NFC, and AI on the effectiveness of ad appeals that are framed emotionally versus rationally. Surprisingly, younger adults find emotional appeals more persuasive than rational appeals; they remember emotionally-framed appeals better than rationally-framed appeals. Interestingly, older adults develop more positive Aad when exposed to rational appeals than to negative ones. Older adults' preference for an informative ad over a negative ad is consistent with socioemotional selectivity theory (Carstensen et al., 2003) which suggests that older adults will respond more positively to rational, informational ads than to ones that evoke negative emotions. As expected, higher-NFC individuals, regardless of age, exhibited more Iad, Aad, and Rad overall than lower-NFC individuals. Surprisingly, when looking at each appeal frame separately, NFC effects were observed only for emotional appeals. Forced ad exposure likely encouraged a similar degree of processing among both lower- and higher-NFC individuals. A logical extension of the mood as information viewpoint (Schwarz and Clore, 1988) is that emotional appeals increase cognitive load required to process an ad (Huhmann, 2007). The current study's NFC findings support this idea. All ads had extensive copy. Lower-NFC individuals who possess less intrinsic motivation to tackle both an emotional appeal frame and long copy, showed similar recall for positive-emotional and rational ad appeals and difference in liking between emotional and rational ad appeals. Higher-NFC individuals, who possess more intrinsic motivation to overcome the high cognitive load of emotional information combined with long copy, recalled more of negative- and positive-emotional than rational ad appeals, likely due to increased central processing (Cacioppo et al., 1996).