Research On Effects Of Metaphorical Advertisements From The Perspective Of Consumer Learning

As a means of information dissemination,advertising has been valued by more and more enterprises and applied to their marketing activities.This has greatly promoted the expansion of the advertising market in various countries and the increase in advertising expenditures.However,the issue of advertising effectiveness still affects the interests of all stakeholders despite the rapid development of the advertising industry.For advertisers,their biggest concern is whether the high advertising costs can produce the expected advertising effects.In this case,in order to design advertisements that are more persuasive to consumers,advertising designers often use a variety of rhetorical figures to convey advertising selling points to consumers,and metaphor is one of them,on the basis of which metaphorical ads are those that deliver selling points in an implicitly metaphorical way.Since the important role of metaphor in improving the effectiveness of advertising persuasion has gradually attracted the attention of advertising practitioners,researchers are also becoming interested in studying the effects of metaphorical ads.Despite all this,the research under this topic is mainly concentrated in western academic circles,and domestic scholars rarely set foot in this filed.Therefore,this paper takes the advertising practices of domestic enterprises as the realistic foundation and the domestic consumers as the research object,and explores the effects of advertising metaphors in the Chinese market.In addition,since previous research under the rhetoric view has explored almost all aspects of this topic,it is difficult to make new discoveries by continuing doing research under the same view,forcing us to find new perspectives for breakthroughs.Thus,starting from the perspective of consumer learning and particularly focusing on the knowledge transfer theory in this field,this paper considers metaphor as an internal learning mechanism and analyzes its effects in advertising.An important premise for studying the effects of advertising metaphor is that metaphor as an advertising strategy is indeed widely used in advertising practices.Based on this,we firstly conduct a pilot study aimed to explore the use and features of metaphors in advertising through a content analysis.The main findings are as follows.Firstly,metaphors are indeed persuasive in advertising practices,and they are employed in over 20% business ads,a quarter of which use more than one metaphor at the same time.Secondly,metaphors are mainly used to deliver selling points like product features or product benefits by enterprises that sell physical products.Thirdly,metaphors are more often seen in headlines and body copies but most of them tend to be less novel;in contrast,pictures in advertisements do not often contain metaphors,but once they do,metaphors used are usually novel.On the basis of the solid foundation provided by the pilot study,we conduct the following three empirical studies:Study 1 takes using metaphors as an internal learning mechanism or not as the starting point,and focuses on the effects of metaphor form on consumers' responses towards ads.First,regarding the cognitive effects,we find that using metaphors(vs.not using metaphor)makes it easier for consumers to have knowledge transferred related to structural relationship instead of attribute characteristics,and to produce cognitive inferences that are not in line with advertisers' expectations,both of which are responsible for eliciting more cognitive elaborations.Second,in terms of emotional effects,we find that advertisements with metaphors can elicit more positive attitudes than those without metaphors,and the emotional tendency of the source domain in a metaphor will moderate the effect of metaphor form on consumers' ad attitude.Third,for the behavioral effects,using metaphors in advertisements can elicit higher purchase intention,in which both the emotional tendency of the source domain in a metaphor and the presence or absence of explanatory information paly a moderating role.Based on the manifestations of metaphor ads' effects,further mediation analyses show that cognitive elaboration and ad attitude play mediating roles successively in the influence of metaphor form on purchase intention if relevant moderating factors are not considered,but if they are,the generation of metaphor ads' effects do not always follow the path of “cognitive-emotion-behavior”.Study 2,starting with the idea that what kind of metaphors are used as an internal learning mechanism in advertising,focuses on the effects of metaphor content on consumers' responses towards ads.Based on a detailed discussion of the artful deviation view,which is widely used in previous studies to explain the cause of metaphor ads' effects,we pointed out that the limitation of this account is that it only takes into consideration the artful deviation in form.The truth is that under the view of consumer learning,both the form of learning the new knowledge(i.e.using metaphor or not)and the old knowledge used to learn the new knowledge(i.e.using which type of metaphor)will influence final learning effects.Benefiting from the consumer learning view,we proposed that metaphor content is also an important source of generating advertising effects.Specifically,the degree of conceptual similarity between the source domain and the target domain in a metaphor determines the difference of metaphors in content,which should also be responsible for the generation of metaphor ads' effects.The results of a laboratory experiment provides support for our proposed view because in comparison with metaphors composed of two concepts which have a higher degree of conceptual similarity,those composed of two concepts sharing a lower degree of conceptual similarity can elicit more cognitive elaboration,more positive ad attitude and higher purchase intention.Study 3,combining the preceding studyies,focuses on the role of both metaphor form and metaphor content in creating effective ads.Specifically,since visual attention is of great significance in consumer learning and advertising information processing,the eyetracking technology was used to explore consumers' visual processing patterns of metaphors ads.It is found that there are differences in the effects of metaphor form and metaphor content on consumers' eye movements.First,using metaphors or not does not influence an advertisement's power in attention capture,but using metaphors(vs.not using metaphors)will elicit longer fixation durations and more fixations counts in selling points containing metaphor or brand information.Second,the choice of metaphors does not influence an advertisement's power in attention capture,but in comparison with metaphors composed of two concepts which have a lower degree of conceptual similarity,those composed of two concepts sharing a higher degree of conceptual similarity can elicit longer fixation durations and more fixations counts.Apart from these,it is also found that consumers' visual processing of metaphor ads and their responses to these ads are not related.This study has made the following theoretical and practical contributions.In terms of the theoretical contributions,firstly we reveal the manifestations of the cognitive,emotional and behavioral effects of metaphor ads,and further explores the path of how these effects generated;secondly we propose that the effects of metaphor ads come from not only metaphor form but also metaphor content;thirdly we reveal consumers' visual processing patterns of metaphors ads,and prove that consumers' visual processing of metaphor ads and their responses to these ads are not closely related.The practical contributions are as follows: firstly,using metaphors or not in delivering selling points can elicit different responses,and consumers' cognitive responses and their affective responses can successively mediate the influence of metaphor form on their motivational responses;secondly,advertisers cannot rest easy when they decide to use metaphors in advertising practices because they have to further decide which kind of metaphor to use;thirdly,using metaphors to deliver selling points is not a good choice for advertisers to capture consumers' attention within a short time,but advertisements using metaphors performs better in eliciting consumers to spend more time on selling points and brand information than those without metaphors.It is also worth noting that the most attractive metaphor ads are not necessarily the most likeable ones since consumers' visual processing of metaphor ads and their responses to these ads are not closely related.