Arousing Consumer Emotions: The Impact Of The Product Category

Emotions are one of the key consumer behaviour motivators. Conequently, arousing emotions in the communication process significantly contributes to successful business performance. Advertisements, as a communication platform, need to possess certain characteristics in order to be able to arouse consumers' emotions. However, arousing emotions does not only depend on ad characteristics, but on the product category too. This paper points out that the product category and immanent ad characteristics have to be considered in order to arouse desirable emotions among consumers. Two of non-durable goods categories - milk products and fashion clothes were explored. Results point out that the ad characteristic of specific product category provokes different types or intensity of emotions, regardless of whether it's positive, negative or warm emotion. Field research is based on Edell and Bruke (1987) emotion’s scale, and for ad characteristics Janssens and De Pelsmackera (2005) as well as Olney, Holbrook and Batra (1991) insights were used. Implementation of these research results in creating advertisement strategy should improve its efficiency, which is, among other implications, an important contribution of the subject research. Also, the paper outlines recommendations for marketing practitioners in order to help them generate more effective communication messages.