In almost all successful advertising campaigns, an appeal to emotion sparks a call-to-action that motivates viewers to become consumers. But according to research from a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign expert who studies consumer information-processing and memory, emotionally arousing advertisements may not always help improve consumers’ immediate memory.
A new paper co-written by Hayden Noel, a clinical associate professor of business administration at the Gies College of Business at Illinois, finds that an ad’s emotional arousal can have a negative effect on immediate memory but a positive effect on delayed memory — but only if the level of emotional arousal elicited by the ad is congruent with the ad’s claims.
“Emotionally arousing appeals have long been used in advertising, but the impact of those appeals on consumers’ memory has always been a bit unclear,” Noel said….
