Summary
Sept 2019 (Vol. 59, Issue 3): NEUROMARKETING

The Impact of Rational, Emotional, and Physiological Advertising Images on Purchase Intention: How TV Ads Influence Brand Memory
Previous research has shown that TV commercials are important influencers of brand memories. Academic theory and practitioner-performance metrics have focused on consumer recall and recognition of advertising content. This study further advances that practice by considering effects from advertising that is “aligned with rational, emotional, and physiological appeals,” according to Charles Young and Christian Otto (Ameritest), and Brian Gillespie (University of New Mexico Robert O. Anderson School of Management).

This practitioner/academic collaboration used a dataset representing 59,000 consumer interviews collected nationally between 2008 and 2009 on 590 TV commercials that aired for the top 16 U.S. fast-food restaurant brands. The researchers used a moment-by-moment visual-recognition test that had been developed, validated, and implemented by industry professionals to demonstrate that emotional and physiological appeals are more likely to be related to consumer purchase intention compared with rational visual appeals.

Among the implications:

• The findings “stress the importance of understanding how advertising content influences brand memory and offer further insights into both theory and practice.
• “Visual advertising appeals affect consumers’ future purchase intention: Images associated with emotional and physiological appeals lead to greater consumer purchase intention; images associated with rational appeals do not.
• “Higher levels of rational responses suppress the positive benefits of emotionally and physiologically based responses on purchase intention.
• “The positive association between emotional and physiological responses, on the one hand, and purchase intention, on the other, remain when rational responses are lower.”

Read the full JAR article here.