This JAR paper, authored by academics from Peru and Spain, addresses a practical and topical marketing issue: How do consumers emotionally process and react to messaging intended to prompt responsible behavior toward the environment?
The authors used a psychophysiological approach to analyze how different combinations of elements in an advertisement generated different types of response. (The paper explains Psychophysiology, the study of the relationship between the mind and the body. Some of the methods used in the researchers’ experiment are rarely used; others, such as skin conductance and facial coding, are widely used in neuromarketing studies.)
The authors’ sought to identify messages that can activate respondents’ motivational system in ways that would result in physical action, that is, find the types of messages that are better at provoking emotion so as to increase the potential of a campaign to elicit positive changes in behavior. The outcome of their work: