Study On Consumer’s Nerual Mechanism Of Multi-modal Metaphor Comprehension In Advertising

In the era of information explosion, it is very important for marketing to help consumers understand the product’s features and characteristics quickly in a limited period of time. Metaphorical advertising is the strategy that uses familiar objects to describe new products (e.g, describe the vehicle acceleration effect with leopard metaphor). It’s more easy and convenient for consumers to understand the complex and unfamiliar new products, which can convince consumers of buying the new products.When dealing with metaphors information in advertising, consumers have to found the found similarities and their reasoning between two things. Studies found that the reasoning can make consumers process the advertising metaphor information deeper, and this deeper processing of advertising information will positively affect consumer attitudes toward product, as well as advertising content memory. Therefore, we studied the cognitive processing mechanism when consumer is in the face of the metaphorical ads, and we intended to open the black box behind the brain and to promote the marketing result, which has significance in precise marketing.The present study is based on Neuromarketing, and conceptual metaphor theory, subjective understanding of consumer-level model (LSC) as the theoretical basis, we studied the consumer’s cognitive process when dealing with advertising metaphors from the perspective of automobile and animal metaphors. Event-related potentials was applied in present study, supplemented by survey research methods. In this study, we drew the following conclusions:(1) Three-stage model of consumer’s cognitive processing in multimodal metaphors advertising was proposed, which includes cross-modal cognitive conflict stage (N300), semantic conflict processing stage (N400), and semantic integration stage (LPC).(2) LSC model was supported by EEG data. The result supported that metaphors in ad will induce consumers’ superficial understanding of advertising messages, and also encourage consumers to get a deeper understand on advertising messages based on personal experience and knowledge, which will improve the level of advertising messages memory effectively.