Emotional influence in car advertisements on consumer behaviour

Abstract

This dissertation was written with the aim of getting an added insight into the world of advertising and consumer behaviour. Nowadays there are so many options to choose from when buying any product that it is interesting to see how advertising can influence people to choose a particular brand over others, even though people are inundated with a plethora of messages from companies in an attempt to persuade them to choose their product over a competitor‘s. The researcher wanted to test whether emotional appeals in advertisements had any effect on how the consumer felt about the brand being represented, and what degree these influences had. In order to do so, the researcher conducted four focus groups from two different target markets, those that were car enthusiasts, and those that were just interested in cars as a convenient mode of transportation. Each focus group was given an advert to assess about a particular brand of car, one group had an emotional advertisement whilst the other an informational one. The focus groups gave oral feedback and filled in a couple of questions before and after watching their designated advert to see the impact that it had on their view of the brand. The reason behind this was to see in which situations different types of adverts work, and to what extent. The results showed that in almost all cases some sort of emotional appeal, or creative take on the advert worked well and captured the viewer‘s interest more, hence leaving a better impression on them regarding the brand. However all the groups agreed that some form of information should be given, or at least the brand be shown throughout. It was interesting to see what sort of a balance could be struck between information and emotion, how people actually felt about advertising, and which ones they could recall from their past.