Creativity in advertisement: A comparison of
humorous, emotional and non-creative styles.
Graduate School of Communication
Master Thesis
Master’s track: Corporate communication
Student: Alessio Di Mauro (nr. 10918280)
Thesis supervisor: James Slevin
Word count: 6978
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Abstract
Advertising is a growing industry where standing out from competitors is not only a crucial matter, but also a difficult one. As a result, consumers are constantly bombarded with advertisements in every media channel, both digital and non-digital, and they tend to pay less attention to them. Although creativity is already proven to be a successful tool for marketing professionals to catch consumers’ attention and persuade them to buy their products, it is important to shed light on how different creative styles can affect consumers in relation to the product that they are promoting, to better choose a creative style over the other, or a factual advertisement instead, for boosting their brand’s name in the market. For this purpose, creative and non-creative advertisements were compared in regards to brand recall, brand image and purchase intention. Specifically, two types of creative advertisements were used: emotional and humorous ones. In this study product involvement was added as a moderator, to assess the effect of high involvement and low involvement products on the strength of the effectiveness of creative advertisement. The results of an online experiment that was carried out (N=241) suggest that creativity in advertisement is indeed a good predictor of a positive brand image, purchase intention and brand recall. Specifically, low involvement products are the ones that are mostly affected by creative styles, while for higher involvement products the effectiveness of creative styles over non-creative was not only smaller as predicted, but also not significantly higher. These results are a first step towards a better understanding of how to attract consumers’ attention with advertisements on the base of the type of product that is being advertised to them. Companies can use these results as guidelines when choosing a new marketing campaign in order to ensure the best outcome.
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Introduction
During the past few years, the industry of advertisement saw a steep growth, with investments from companies increasing on a year-to-year basis (Arzanagh & Habibollah, 2014). The world has quickly changed, thanks to television spreading all over the world and entering everybody’s homes, while technological advancements such as the introduction of the Personal Computer first, and the Smartphone later, gave more and more access to information to people, making the world more connected than it has ever been. Nowadays people are constantly online and viewing content, which is becoming so much that it is harder and harder for companies to get consumers’ attention. In the digital era, standing out from your competitors as a company is a hard but crucial aim. It is for this reason that often companies allocate a lot of their resources to understand the behavior of consumers and create advertisements that suit them (Srivastava, 2016). Nowadays advertising is literally everywhere: you can see them at home or around town, when you’re watching television or when you’re scrolling through your Instagram feed, your Facebook feed or while watching something on YouTube. They are present in every kind of media: from print to digital, the advertising industry is strong, and there is simply no way to avoid being exposed to it (Roth-Cohen & Limor, 2018). Belch & Belch (2009) state that advertising is a paid persuasion attempt from companies towards consumers, and it is an instrument of persuasive communication that not only helps companies to sell products, but also to promote themselves as organization and their own personality or culture.
It is clear enough, from this statement, that in order to be effective advertising has to stand out among consumers, so they can process what they were exposed to and, eventually, be persuaded to purchase the products that they were shown. If consumers are constantly bombarded with only facts and figures regarding a product, they will be less likely to pay attention to the advertisement, as opposed to presenting the product in the form of a story
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(Srivastava, 2016). This is when creativity comes into play. Many marketing professionals believe that creativity is an essential element of success in such a crowded and busy sector (Smith et al., 2007, Till & Baack, 2005, Goldenberg, Mazursky & Solomon, 1999), as it allows organizations to come up with a unique story to tell their consumers, that can help them having a stronger impact on the viewers. Although these researchers agree that creativity is an essential element of success, it is not always clear which creative style might suit a certain product better, so it is important to understand whether a certain creative style might suit a certain product category, as we can easily imagine that an advertisement for a toothpaste (low involvement product) will have a different impact and will make use of different elements than an advertising for a smartphone (low involvement product). Creativity is a quite broad term, and although several definitions of its concept exist in academia, one that helps us explaining it in the context of advertisement is the following: “The extent to which an ad contains brand or executional elements that are different, novel, unusual, original, unique etc.” (Smith, Mackenzie, Yang, Buchholz, & Darley, 2007, p.820). A good creative advertisement has to correctly mix these elements and deliver them with relevance to the brand advertised (Ang & Low, 2000).
Although creativity is often considered an important element when building a new marketing campaign or advertisement, there is still a relatively small amount of research investigating it (Smith et al., 2007), thus the importance of enriching the literature about it to being able to better understand how it may work and the scopes it might serve.
When consumers are exposed to creative advertisements, the unexpected communication (given by the factors mentioned above) forces them to stop and elaborate on what they just saw (Sjödin & Törn, 2006). Creativity can take form – among many – of emotional or humorous advertisements, and several studies have been carried out showing the benefits that the two different styles can give. For example, a study conducted by Truss (2006) showed
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that emotional advertisement has a positive effect on brand recall, while a study conducted by Lee (2014) showed that people are more likely to want to be associated with a brand when an advertisement makes them laugh.
Although some studies have been conducted that investigated the effectiveness of creativity in advertising (Chen, Yang, & Smith, 2016; Reinartz, 2013), and some other studies compared different advertisements creative styles (Srivastava, 2016), it has still to be understood how creativity can influence the effectiveness of an advertisement based on the product that is being advertised. In other words, it has to be understood in which case it may be better to use one approach over the other according to the product category that is being advertised. For this purpose, low involvement products and low involvement products will be compared, as it can be easily expected that any persuasive attempt is going to be less effective for a low involvement product advertisement, where consumers have to exert more cognitive effort into elaborating it. Allowing us to correctly asses for which kind of product category a particular advertising style may be suited for organizations in order to avoid a negative return on investment when allocating resources to a marketing campaign, while making it more effective at the same time. For the reasons explained above, we therefore come up with the following research questions:
RQ1: Does the use of creativity, in the form of humorous or emotional advertisements, positively affect brand recall, purchase intention and brand image, compared to non-creative
advertisements?
RQ2: Does product category (low involvement vs low involvement) affect the effectiveness of creative over non-creative advertisements regarding brand recall, purchase intention and
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Shedding light on these research questions will be useful to develop new guidelines which could help marketeers and communication professionals to choose the best suitable advertising style for their products, allowing them to tailor them to an advertisement that will help them to stand out from their competitors in the very crowded advertising market.
Theoretical Framework
Although both emotional and humorous advertisements represent an expression of creativity, there are quite some substantial differences between these two styles that will be worth mentioning.
Humor has been widely used in advertisement, and has attracted not only many marketers, but also researchers that investigated the topic extensively (Swani, Weinberger, & Gulas, 2013). When an advertisement makes people feel happy, makes them laugh or smile, then it can be considered a humorous one (Chang & Chang, 2014). It is said that humor can lower a person’s defenses and make them more attentive to the message, thanks to a usually unexpected twist that forces them to elaborate more on the message, and it also makes it more likely that people will share the advertisement with their peers, allowing it to spread more easily through electronic word of mouth (Srivastava, 2016). Some studies found that it also has a positive effect on brand recall and comprehension (Hartnett, Kennedy, Sharp, & Greenacre, 2016).
On the other hand, emotional advertisements have also been used for quite a long time now, and they appeal consumers because they connect them with the advertisement protagonist and make them feel part of it (Srivastava, 2016). Emotional advertisements can make use of positive or negative emotions: negative emotions have been shown to be better remembered and recalled than positive ones (Snipes, LaTour, & Bliss, 1999), and particularly
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fear has been proven to facilitate attention to the message (De Vos, Crouch, & Ilicic, 2016). Positive emotions, such as hope, love, optimism or feeling inspired, have shown to generate more elaborative networks of association in consumers’ minds (Isen, 2001) and make information processing more creative, flexible and efficient (De Vos et al., 2016). Emotional advertisement are less likely to be persuasive enough if the message is not of the right lenght, because more time is needed from consumers to create a bond with the protagonist of the story or to develop their own feelings about the structure of the story being told.
Companies need to stand out among their competitors in the overly crowded advertising industry, and to measure whether their creative efforts had any positive results on the brand and the product advertised, there are some concepts that can be used to keep track of how well they are doing it.
These are brand recall, purchase intention and brand image, which are three important outcomes to measure when promoting a new product/brand, since consumers show a favorable attitude to products and companies when these increase (Ko, Cho, & Roberts, 2005; Martins, Costa, Oliveira, Gonçalves, & Branco, 2017).
Brand recall is a construct that many academics use as a tool to measure the effectiveness of an advertisement (Vashisht, & Royne, 2016). When consumers are exposed to an advertisement, it is important for the brand that they will remember not only what was advertised, but also who advertised it, so the better the advertisement, the more likely people that are exposed to it will be to remember the brand that is being promoted. In previous studies, brand recall was found to positively increase when products were advertised using either an emotional (Truss, 2006) or humorous style (Hartnett et al., 2016), therefore we hypothesize that an advertisement that makes use of creativity, being it humorous or emotional, will be significantly better in predicting an improvement in brand recall than an advertisement that does not. We then formulate the following hypothesis:
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H1: Creative advertisements (emotional and humorous) will have a more positive effect on
brand recall compared to non-creative advertisements
“Standing out” among competitors can be a double-edged sword, as it is also important to stand out positively. Bad advertising can also backlash and have the effect of putting a company on the spotlight, but not necessarily for good reasons. This is why it is important for companies not only to have people remembering their brand after being exposed to an advertisement, but also to build a positive association with the brand. This is when measuring brand image becomes crucial.
Brand image was defined by Keller (1993) as: “ the set of associations linked to the brand that consumers hold in memory”. These can be signs, symbols, thoughts, feelings and experiences that consumers can relate to with the brand (Danes, Hess, Story, & Vorst, 2012). Brand image can be influenced by attributes that are directly related to the product or from others that are not directly related to it. A good product can build a good image for a brand, but so does a correctly executed advertisement, by giving personality to it (Schlesinger & Yagüe-Guillen, 2013). It is important for companies to try to keep a positive brand image, as it is considered to be a factor that increases the probability of brand choice (Keller, 1993). To develop an image of the brand in their mind, consumers base their reasoning on the connections and associations with the brand (Danes et al., 2012), which means that the more positive these will be, the more positive the brand image they build will be. A way to make consumers develop positive connections to the brand is through advertisements – particularly creative ones – as some studies found out that showed how emotional advertisement can positively affect brand image (Chan, 1996), while others already assessed that humor can help in improving brand recall and association (Hartnett et al., 2016), hence we can expect
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that from this positive association a better brand image will develop, thus bringing us to formulate the following hypothesis:
H2: Creative advertisements (emotional and humorous) will have a more positive effect on
brand image compared to non-creative advertisements
Brand recall and brand image are parameters that companies want to try to keep as good as possible, and a good advertisement must be able to positively affect them.
Ultimately, when a brand is effectively able to stand out among its competitors with a good advertisement, selling the product will be the key step to the success of its marketing campaign, so purchase intention should also be positively related to a creative adverisement, in order to make it effective. According to Wu, Yeh, & Hsiao (2011), purchase intention expresses the probability that consumers will plan to purchase a determined service or product. If purchase intention is high, then consumers’ willingness to buy something will increase, compared to products where purchase intention is low (Martins et al., 2017). Several factors can influence purchase intention, such as a positive prior experience with similar products from the same brand (Wu et al., 2011) or perception of a product’s price fairness (Lu, Fan, & Zhou, 2016). Previous literature has shown that creativity in advertisement is linked to purchase intention and brand attitude (Ang & Low, 2000; Chan, 1996), and in a study conducted by Eisend (2008), purchase intention was found to be positively influenced by humorous advertisements. A study conducted by Biel and Bridgwater (1990) proved that for fast moving consumer goods, which fall under the “low involvement” product category, there was a significant relationship between likeability and sales effectiveness, so people who liked a commercial were more likely to be persuaded
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compared to people who felt neutral about it. This leads us to formulating the following hypothesis:
H3: Creative advertisements (emotional and hhumorous) will have a more positive
effect on purchase intention compared to non-creative advertisements
The study conducted by Biel and Bridgwater (1990) failed to replicate the same findings for low involvement products, which might mean that for that kind of products consumers are less likely to be persuaded by advertisements. As described by Zaichkowsky (1985), product involvement is “a person’s perceived relevance of the object based on inherent needs, values and interests”. If they seek information about a product before purchasing it, and engage in the purchase process carefully, it means the product falls under the “low involvement” category. Usually consumers are more interested about low involvement products and want to learn more about them. This happens because often these kinds of products provide them with social approval, sensory gratification or self-expression (Flores, Chen & Ross, 2014). High involvement products involve a higher risk associated with their purchase, so consumers are more likely to engage in an in-depth analysis of the features of the product advertised and pay more attention to the main message contained in the advertisement rather than its peripheral cues, such as the style of the advertisement and its execution (Kong & Zhang, 2013). For low involvement products, they will not engage in the same kind of deep reasoning, and they will be more likely to make a purchase decision based on a superficial analysis, seeking less information about the product (Ghasemaghaei & Hassanein, 2015) and being less willing to pay a high amount of money for them.
When exposed to an advertisement, consumers can go both through a central or peripheral route to make sense of persuasion. Petty, Cacioppo, & Schumann (1983) developed a model – called elaboration likelihood model – showing that when involvement is
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high, persuasion will happen through a central route, while when involvement is low, it will happen through a peripheral one. When going through a central route, consumers exert more cognitive effort to evaluate the information they are exposed to, while when going through a peripheral one, they will exert less cognitive effort and make their evaluation on more easily accessible cues.
It is clear from the distinction outlined above that there may be a big difference in the involvement during the purchase process from customers between products from different categories. This leads us to think that a creative advertisement style, being either humorous or emotional, can be useful in improving the persuasion of the message especially for low involvement products, while for high involvement products this kind of persuasion is less likely to happen, but it has yet to be understood which one of the two approaches (humorous vs emotional) might be more effective. We therefore draw the following hypotheses:
H4: Product category (low involvement vs low involvement) moderates the relationship
between creative advertisements (emotional and humorous) and brand recall: the difference in brand recall between creative and non-creative advertisements will be smaller for low
involvement products
H5: Product category (low involvement vs low involvement) moderates the relationship
between creative advertisements (emotional and humorous) and brand image: the difference in brand image between creative and non-creative advertisements will be smaller for low
involvement products
H6: Product category (low involvement vs low involvement) moderates the relationship
between creative advertisements (emotional and humorous) and purchase intention: the difference in purchase intention between creative and non-creative advertisements will be
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The conceptual framework in the next page summarizes these hypotheses:
Method
DesignTo test these hypotheses an experiment was carried out, and respondents were recruited through an online link that was pasted in several social networks and websites. Most of the respondents were recruited through Facebook and were asked to invite their own friends to join the study. The sample was therefore a convenience one, not a random one, due to the high expenses of carrying out a research with a random sample and the very limited funding available for this research, although it will lower the external validity of the study. In total, 241 people took part in the experiment and completed the questionnaire, 140 of which were females (58,1%). The majority of respondents came from Italy (42,7%) and The Netherlands (15,4%) and the most of the people involved in the study had obtained a bachelor’s degree (41,1%). Participants’ mean age was 28.94 years old (SD = 10.90).
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After being selected, participants were randomly assigned to each of the different experimental conditions, in order to keep a high internal validity. The experiment itself was a survey-embedded one on Qualtrics. There was one experimental condition per type of advertisement, making it a 3x2 factorial design: low involvement/low involvement product category, humorous, emotional and non-creative type of advertisement. There were 6 different experimental conditions in total, as the table below (figure 2) shows:
Type of advertisement
Humorous Emotional Non-creative
Low involvement product
Low involvement product
When participants joined the study, they were first asked to agree with the consent form that was shown to them. After that, they were shown a video of a certain product that fell within one of these six categories and were asked to complete a questionnaire where brand image, purchase intention and brand recall were measured. They were also asked eight questions in a Likert-scale from Mercanti-Guérin (2008) to measure the creativity of the advertisement and its humorousness and emotionality, as a manipulation check. These questions are: 1)This ad is original, 2)This ad made me laugh, 3)This ad links up elements that are not usually seen together, 4) This ad is like a lot of other ads for this type of product, 5) I would’ve never thought of what this ad shows, 6)This ad is beautiful, 7)This ad is well designed and 8)This ad touched my feelings.
It has to be noted that since the experimental material that respondents were shown was real video footage of existing advertisements, no fictional brand could be constructed, so
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respondents could have been slightly biased by the brand that they were exposed to. To make sure these bias stay to a minimum level, only commercials that are from lesser known company (especially in Europe) were shown.
Measures
After being exposed to the manipulations, respondents were asked a set of questions to measure brand image through a slightly adapted version of the scale developed by Martínez, Montaner, & Pina (2009), as this is the most frequently applied scale in literature to measure brand image (Plumeyer, Kottemann, Böger, & Decker, 2017). The scale consists of 10 statements: a) the brand is nice, b) the brand has a personality that distinguish itself from competitors’ brands, c) it’s a brand that doesn’t disappoint its customers, d) it’s one of the best brands in the sector, e) the brand provides good value for money, f) there is a reason to buy the brand instead of others, g) the brand has personality, h) the brand is interesting, i) I have a clear impression of the type of people who consume the brand, j) this brand is different from competing brands. Respondents were asked how strongly they agreed or disagreed with each of these statements on a 7-point Likert scale.
Right after, purchase intention was measured, with a scale developed by Bian & Forsythe (2012), which consists of five questions that were slightly adapted for the purpose of this study: a) If I were going to purchase a similar product now, I would consider buying this brand. b) If I were shopping for a similar product in the future, the likelihood I would purchase this brand is high. c) The probability I would consider buying from this brand is high. d) I would like to possess a product from this brand. e) Even if I couldn’t afford this product, I’d recommend it to somebody who can.
To test the reliability of these scaled, and whether they really measured what they were intended to measure, a principal axis factor analysis was conducted with the 15 items that
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measure “brand image” and “purchase intention”. Both the Eigenvalue-criterion (bigger than 1: eigenvalue factor 1 is 8,35; and factor 2 is 1,14) and the Scree Plot showed that there were indeed two separate factors. Together, these factors explained 63,32% of the variance in the original variables’ items. After a Direct Oblimin Rotation, the factors were labeled: 1) “brand image scale” (Cronbach’s alpha = .89) and 2) “purchase intention scale” (Cronbach’s alpha
= .93).
Finally, respondents were asked to correctly select the brand that was shown in the advertisement that they just had watched from a list of 12 brands, to measure brand recall. For this purpose, some fictional brands were constructed that had similar names to the ones that were in the experiment, to make sure that respondents were less likely to just guess the right brand from the list.
Manipulation Check
Before testing the hypotheses, a manipulation check was conducted in order to see whether respondents perceived the experimental manipulation as intended. To do so, a One-way ANOVA was conducted with the experimental conditions grouped into 3 categories (humorous, emotional and non-creative, merging the involvement categories into 1 category for the purpose of this analysis in order to have 3 groups and not 6) and the newly computed scale for measuring the creativity of the advertisement, alongside with two questions to measure its humorousness and its emotionality.
Regarding advertisement creativity, Levene’s tests for equality of variance was significant, F (2,238) = 49.24, p = <.001, η² = .41. A Bonferroni posthoc test revealed that participants who were shown a non-creative advertisement thought it was less creative than the people who saw the humorous (Mdifference = -1.29, p = <.001) or emotional advertisement (Mdifference = -1.34, p = <.001).
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Regarding advertisement humorousness, Levene’s test for equality of variance was significant, F (2,238) = 17.19, p = <.001, η² = .14. A Bonferroni posthoc test revealed that participants who were shown a humorous advertisement thought it was more humorous than the people who saw the emotional (Mdifference = 1.06, p = .002) or non-creative advertisement (Mdifference = -1.70, p = <.001).
Finally, for advertisement emotionality, Levene’s test for equality of variance was also significant, F (2,238) = 54.75, p = <.001, η² = .46. A Bonferroni posthoc test revealed that participants who were shown an emotional advertisement thought it was more emotional than the people who saw the humorous (Mdifference = 2.29, p = <.001) or non-creative advertisement (Mdifference = 2.52, p = <.001).
Manipulation check showed that all of the manipulations that respondents were exposed to were perceived as they were intended, so they were effective and it was possible to proceed with the analyses for testing the hypotheses to answer the research questions.
Results
Randomization check
Before running the analyses to test the hypotheses, randomization of the distribution between conditions for gender was tested with a Chi-square test. The test showed that there were no significant differences between conditions on gender, X2 (10) = 11.348, p = .331, so randomization on gender was successful. To check if participants’ age was comparable over the different experimental conditions, a one-way ANOVA was conducted with the experimental condition as the independent variable and age as dependent. The analysis of variance showed that there were no significant differences between conditions on age, F (5,235) = .620, p = .685, so randomization on age was also successful. To check if educational level was also comparable over the different experimental conditions, a Chi-square test was conducted. The test showed that there were no significant differences between
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conditions on educational level, X2 (20) = 18.606, p = .548, so randomization on educational level was also successful.
Hypotheses testing
To answer H1, stating that “creative advertisements (emotional and humorous) will have a more positive effect on brand recall compared to non-creative advertisements”, the percentage of respondents that correctly identified the brand that was advertised from a list of 12 brands was compared across the experimental conditions (ignoring the product involvement factor, while leaving the factors humor, emotions and non-creative as they were). Humorous advertisements were correctly recalled by 79% of respondents that were exposed to them, while emotional advertisements were recalled by 91% of respondents that were exposed to them. Non-creative advertisements were recalled only by 68% of people who were exposed to them.Hypothesis 1 was therefore supported.
H4 added a moderation effect to H1, stating that “product category (low involvement vs low involvement) moderates the relationship between creative advertisements (emotional and humorous) and brand recall: the difference in brand recall between creative and non-creative advertisements will be smaller for low involvement products”. Again, here the total number of respondents that correctly identified the brand that was advertised from a list of 12 brands was compared across the experimental conditions (this time by keeping the factor product involvement into account). For low involvement products, 78% of participants exposed to a creative advertisement correctly recalled the brand, while 86.50% correctly recalled the non-creative advertisement. For low involvement products, 91.26% of participants exposed to a creative advertisement correctly recalled the brand, while only 46.70% correctly recalled the non-creative advertisement. Hypothesis 4 was therefore partially supported.
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To answer H2, stating that “creative advertisements (emotional and humorous) will have a more positive effect on brand image compared to non-creative advertisements”, a One-way ANOVA was conducted with the experimental conditions grouped intro 3 categories (humorous, emotional and non-creative again as previously done for the manipulation check) and the brand image scale. Levene’s test for equality of variance was significant, F(2,238) = 15.54, p = <.001, η²= .13. A Bonferroni posthoc test revealed that participants who were shown a non-creative advertisement scored significantly lower in the brand image scale than the ones who saw the humorous (Mdifference = -.70, p = <.001) or emotional advertisement Mdifference = -.76, p = <.001). Hypothesis 2 was therefore supported.
H5 added a moderation effect to H2, stating that “product category (low involvement vs low involvement) moderates the relationship between creative advertisements (emotional and humorous) and brand image: the difference in brand image between creative and non-creative advertisements will be smaller for low involvement products”. To test this hypothesis a One-way ANOVA was conducted with the experimental conditions grouped into four categories (creative low involvement, non-creative high involvement, creative low involvement and non-creative low involvement) and the brand image scale. Levene’s test for equality of variance was significant, F(3,237) = 23.83, p = <.001, η² = .30. A Bonferroni post-hoc test revealed that participants who were shown a low involvement creative advertisement (either humorous or emotional), did not significantly score higher than participants who were shown a low involvement non-creative one (Mdifference = .19, p = 1.000) in brand image, while respondents who were shown a low involvement creative advertisement (either humorous or emotional), did significantly score higher than participants who were shown a low involvement non-creative video (Mdifference = 1.35, p = <.001). Hypothesis 5 was therefore partially supported.
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To answer H3, stating that “creative advertisements (emotional and humorous) will have a more positive effect on purchase intention compared to non-creative advertisements”, a One-way ANOVA was conducted with the experimental conditions grouped into 3 categories humorous, emotional and non-creative once more) and the purchase intention scale. Levene’s test for equality of variance was significant, F (2,238) = 7.96, p = <.001, η² = .07. A Bonferroni posthoc test revealed that participants who were shown a non-creative advertisement scored significantly lower in purchase intention than the ones who saw the emotional advertisement (Mdifference = -.86, p = <.001), but not significantly lower than the ones who saw the humorous advertisement (Mdifference = -.29, p = .622). Unexpectedly, humorous advertisement significantly differed from emotional advertisement (Mdifference = -.58, p = .049). Hypothesis 3 was therefore partially supported.
H6 added a moderation effect on H3, stating that “Product category (low involvement vs low involvement) moderates the relationship between creative advertisements (emotional and humorous) and purchase intention: the difference in purchase intention between creative and non-creative advertisements will be smaller for low involvement products”. To test this hypothesis a One-way ANOVA was conducted with the experimental conditions grouped into four categories (creative low involvement, non-creative high involvement, creative low involvement and non-creative low involvement) and the purchase intention scale. Levene’s test for equality of variance was significant, F(3,237) = 10.60, p = <.001, η² = .13. A Bonferroni post-hoc test revealed that participants who were shown a low involvement creative advertisement (either humorous or emotional), did not significantly score higher than participants who were shown a low involvement non-creative one (Mdifference = .25, p = 1.000) in purchase intention, while respondents who were shown a low involvement creative advertisement (either humorous or emotional), did score significantly higher than participants
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who were shown a low involvement non-creative video (Mdifference = 1.30, p = <.001). Hypothesis 6 is therefore partially supported.
Discussion
The main research questions tried to shed light on whether creative advertisement styles can be a better tool for marketing professionals to incorporate in their strategies, as opposed to advertisement that lack in creativity and fail to engage consumers in any persuasive effort. For the first hypothesis it was expected that a creative advertisement, being either humorous or emotional, would help brands in being better remembered by consumers after they were exposed to the advertisement. Testing this hypothesis, it was found out that respondents who were exposed to a creative advertisement were the ones who were more likely to correctly select the brand advertised from a list, thus correctly recalling the brand. Hypothesis 1 was therefore confirmed and aligned with the results from previous research (Baack, 2005; Hartnett et al., 2016; Snipes et al., 1999; Truss, 2006) but hypothesis 4, which added a moderation by product category to this effect, predicting that the difference would be smaller for low involvement products, was only partially supported: not only for low involvement products the difference between creative and non-creative advertisements became smaller, compared to the low involvement condition where it became actually bigger as predicted, but surprisingly respondents better recalled the non-creative advertisement, hence flipping the relationship. This could be due to the fact that, being a very descriptive advertising for a low involvement product, the non-creative advertisement gave effectively more information to consumers to base their reasoning on, as Petty et al. (1983) explained in their persuasion model that was discussed befroe, so they had to put more cognitive effort into elaborating it, thus leading to a higher attention and a better brand recall in conclusion. Emotional
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advertisements were the ones that overall led to a higher brand recall in this study, followed by the humorous ones.
The second hypothesis stated that creative advertisements can help brands in being perceived positively by consumers that are exposed to them. As discussed above, nowadays it is not only important to stand out from competitors, but it is important to be able to do so in a positive way. A positive brand image can help brands in understanding how they are perceived by the public, and in this study respondents who were exposed to creative advertisemenents, being either humorous or emotional, significantly perceived the brand to have a better image than the ones who were shown a non-creative advertisement, thus confirming hypothesis two. These resutls are in line with the ones from Chan (1996) and Hartnett et al. (2016), and show in this study that it is emotional advertisements that led to a better brand image, compared to both the humorous or non-creative one, although humorous advertisements still led to a significantly better brand image than non-creative ads.
Hypothesis 5 added a moderation by product category to this effect, predicting that this difference in brand image between creative and-non creative advertisements would be smaller for low involvement products: respondents who were shown a low involvement creative advertisement did not score significantly higher in the brand image scale than participants who were shown a low involvement non-creative one. Although not significant, this relationship still goes in the expected direction, with creative advertisements scoring better than non-creative one in the brand image scale, although by a small margin. Respondents who were shown a low involvement creative advertisement scored significantly higher than participants who were shown a low involvement non-creative advertisement and the difference in the brand image scale was bigger, especially in comparison with the low involvement condition. Hypohesis 5 was therefore partially supported because, although the effects found all went on the expected directions, for low involvement products not only the
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relationship became smaller as predicted, but it even became non-significant. This, again like found for hypothesis 4, could be due to the fact that since the non-creative advertisement was full of information about the product, and consumers are more caful about these cues for low involvement products (Petty et al., 1983), they put more cognitive effort into elaborating these information and they could develop a clearer and positive image of the brand in their mind.
Finally, the third hypothesis stated that creative advertisements would lead to a higher purchase intention than non-creative ones. As selling products is one of the ultimate goals of a company in order to be profitable, it was important to analyze how respondents reacted to the different advertisement styles regarding their intention to purchase products from the company that was advertised. Respondents who were shown an emotional advertisement scored significantly higher in the scale for purchase intention than the ones who were shown either a non-creative advertisement or a humorous one. This is in line with the study conducted by Ang & Low (2000), but unlike in the study conducted by Eisend (2008), in this study humorous advertisement did not significantly affect purchase intention compared to non-creative advertisements, although the results suggest that purchase intention was still higher for the people exposed to the humorous advertising. The hypothesis could therefore be only partially confirmed.
Hypothesis 6 added a moderation by product category to this effect, predicting that the difference in purchase intention between creative and non-creative advertisements would be smaller for low involvement products: respondents who were shown a low involvement creative advertisement did not score significantly higher in the purchase intention scale than participants who were shown a low involvement non-creative one. Here again, although the relationship is not significant, it still goes in the expected direction, with creative advertisements scoring better than the non-creative one, although by a small margin.
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Respondents who were shown a low involvement creative advertisement scored significantly higher than participants who were shown a low involvement non-creative advertisements and the difference in the purchase intention scale was bigger, in comparison with the low involvement condition. Hypothesis 6 was therefore partially supported because, although again the effects found went all in the expected directions, for low involvement products the relationship not only became smaller as predicted, but it became non-significant.
It is clear, by discussing these results, that creativity does have a positive impact on brand recall, brand image and purchase intention. As it was clear by testing hypotheses one, two and three (which together give us an answer to the first research question of this study), creative advertisements led to better brand recall, a better brand image and a higher purchase intention, although for the latter humour was unexpectedly found to not influence it significatively better than non-creative advertisement. Specifically, it was always the group of respondents that was shown an emotional video that had the highest scores in each one of these indicators, and emotional advertisements to be the only ones that led to a significant improvement in purchase intention, compared to non-creative ones.
When adding product category as a moderator for testing the hypotheses four, five and six (which together give us an answer to the second research question of this study), not only the effects of type of advertising became smaller as predicted, but for the low involvement groups the differences became so small that they were not significant anymore, so creative advertisements di not actually improve brand recall, brand image and purchase intention over non-creative ones, unlike they did for low involvement products, where the differences were actually bigger and significant. This can be explained by the fact that consumers exposed to low involvement products tend to be affected by the attributes of the product advertised a lot more than consumers exposed to a low involvement products, who are more likely to be
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affected by the emotional or entertainment-based attributes of the advertisement (Kim J., Kim W. & Park, 2010).
Conclusion
This study set out to find how organizations can stand out in today’s overdcrowded advertising world. The aim was to deliver new guidelines to help marketing professionals when choosing the advertisement style that might suit their products based on their involvement category, as a mean to come up with a successful marketing strategy.
First of all, it confirmed that overall creative adertisements are a better marketing instrument than non-creative ones in helping brands to develop a strong and positive image and boost purchase intention. This is especially true for emotional advertisements, which were the most effective in the experiment, and it is in line with past studies (Reinartz, 2013; Truss, 2006; Srivastava, 2006) that showed how creativity can be an effective tool for communication professionals to improve their messages in a marketing campaign, being it on television, social media or print.
Secondly, in this study it was found that product category does have a very strong role into how creative styles can affect people that are exposed to them, and the conclusion that can be drawn based on the results of this study is that, although creative advertisements are a good tool to engage with the public and to keep their attention – especially for low involvement products – it is also important to tailor the style of the advertisement to the product that is being advertised, as sometimes a factual advertisement can work equally as good or better than a creative advertisement for low involvement products, while not requiring the same amount of resources to be made, as previously researched by Kim, Kim, & Park (2010). This shows that consumers might want to be informed rather than entertained with an advertisement, when the product they are being shown is something that they are highly
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interested about, so creativity can sometimes be a double-edged sword. This is in contrast with some previous research where respondents exposed to low involvement products advertisements showed more positive attitude towards the brand and a higher purchase intention compared to ones that were showed low involvement products (Leu, 2011), so a better understanding of how product involvement influences creative advertisements is needed in order to better succeed in attracting consumers’ attention positively.
In conclusion, companies that want to invest in a marketing campaign should consider making use of creative advertisements, as they are a mean to boost brands’ image and sales and lead to an overall better brand recall. However, some extent of caution is needed when advertising a higher involvement product, as consumers might be more interested in being informed about the product rather than being entertained. Future research can use this study as a starting point to dig deepeer into the interaction between creative and non-creative advertisement styles and product involvement levels, and investigate whether low involvement products can actually benefit from more descriptive advertisements and what are the factors playing a role in this relationship.
Limitations
A few limitations to this study need to be aknowledge. First, the advertisement that people were exposed to were all existing advertisement of real companies. This could have introduced some bias to the results because, although the brands were not well known and established in the European market, some of them are emerging right now, so respondents could have been biased by having seen the brand somewhere else recently. These brands are asian, and being that respondents were mostly Europeans and Americans, this cultural difference could’ve biased the results because different cultures react differently to different humorous or emotional stimuli (Erdodi & Lajiness-O’Neill, 2012). To ensure that this bias
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gets completely canceled, further studies are needed that make use of fictional brands and fake advertisements as a stimuli manipulation.
Another limitation is the duration of the experiment. To make sure that respondents did not get survey fatigue, which can negatively influence the reliability of the survey answers (Van Mol, 2017), the experimental manipulation was consisting of video clips that did not have a longer duration than 3:30 minutes. Considering the artificiality of the setting and the short duration of the message, it is possible that longer stimuli could have brough stronger results to the research.
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