Affect, Cognition, And Attitudes: Explore The Psychological Effect Of Advertising Across Different Product Categories

The psychological effect of advertising, which is the mediator of the advertising input and behavorial output, has always been the hot point in the field of the consumer psychology, and takes up essential place. Emotional appeal and rational appeal is two appealing types of the advertising, which can influence the consumers' mental processing differently. One of the most important factors deciding which type to use is the products' internal characteristics.In the study, the respective advantages of emotional and rational advertising (we use autobiographical and factual advertising) on affect reaction, cognition, attitude, recall and recognition are examed in the laborary condition. Then, we use field experiment and questionnaire to explore the psychological effect of emotional and rational advertising across different product categories, and exploringly bulding up advetising effect models for each each advertising of each product categories. The results show that:(1) The autobiographical advertising has advantages on personal involvement, emotion arising, and advertising attitude; and the factual advertising has advantages on cognition reaction, recall and recognition. Neither of the two advertising show advantages on product attitude with the high-involvement product beening the target product.(2) Emotional advertising can lead to more positive hedonic attitude for product, and the product categories and advertising types play the interaction towards advertising attitude and purchase intention.(3) Advertising attitude and emotional reaction have stronger influence on product attitude for low-involvement hedonic products, while for high-involvement utilitarian products, the product beliefs play more important role.(4) The hedonic attitude for product has stronger influence on purchase intention for low-involvement hedonic products, while for high-involvement utilitarian product, the utilitarian attitude play more important role in purchase intention.(2) The two-dimensional attitude contructs show better predictability toward purchase intentionthan unidimentonal attitude construct.