Gender Differences Exploring For Combining Violence With Humor In Advertising

In this paper, the writer reviewed research production and status about humor andviolence in advertising psychology based on reading some overseas and domesticliteratures. Previous researchers suggested that humor and violence had been widely usedin advertising and media for drawing more attention. Successfully using humor frequentlyresults good effect and better assessment to advertising and brand. Though violenceincreases views’ favor to advertisements, it may result in bad image for product brand.Most prior researches severally explored the effect of violence and humor, seldom puttingthem in same context. We try to explore the impact of violence humor with a genderperspective and choose ads in last Super Bowl as experimental material in this study.The purpose of this study is to explore whether there is a gender differences in views’attitude to advertising,brand and perceived humor under different levels of violence. Thewriter hypothesizes a existing of gender differences in response to three dependentvariables for different stimulus conditions of violence. This article designs an experimentcombined with a questionnaire to test the response of participants. According my research,it can conclude that:（1）The male show more favor to humor advertising with high level violence. Butthere is no significant gender differences under low violence humor.（2）Humor ads that contain high violence are perceived as more humorous whenviewed by men than when viewed by women. There is no significant gender differences onperceived humor when viewing humor ads that contain low violence. This result is only fitfor familiar brands.（3）There is no significant gender differences on views’ attitude to brands eitherviewing high violence humor ads or viewing low.（4）Humor ads that contain high violence result in a less positive brand attitudewhen viewed by women than when viewed by men. There is no significant genderdifferences on brand attitude when viewing humor ads that contain low violence. This result is only fit for unfamiliar brands.（5）Both humor ads that contain high violence and the low ones for unfamiliarbrands are perceived as more humorous when viewed by men than when viewed bywomen.