Influences Of Regulatory Focus On Product Evaluation On The Context Of Advertising

Hedonism, as the main motivation of behaviors, is the theory that everyone is in pursuit of happiness and avoids pain. Researches of regulatory focus explained the reason why people take different strategies to achieve their goal. Higgins (1987, 1997) believed that regulatory focus (enhanced focus and preventive focus) can affect the behaviors of achieving goals. Different regulatory focuses may lead to different risk preferences, creativities and alternative offers, thus resulting in different cognitive and behavior strategies. And all these give rise to different ways to processing information. According to regulatory focus theory, the consistency between information’s presentation format and processing mode may accelerate the flow of information processing. On the context of advertisements, this article studied the different ways of people’s processing information.This article divided advertisements into two types on a similar dimension. One type is enhanced advertisements, which stimulate consumers to pursuit positive results. The other type is preventive advertisements, which stimulate consumers to avoid negative results. The hypothesis of this article for enhanced advertisements is that it may encourage consumers to process information in a relatively large range, have a more comprehensive idea about all the related information by an associated method, and improve the consistency between the processing mode and the advertisement. Consequently, more positive evaluations may be given under this circumstance. While preventive advertisements may induce consumers to process information in a relatively small range and focus more on separated details of these advertisements. With the consistence between their processing mode and these advertisements, more positive evaluations can be made.The hypotheses are tested by experiments. The study chose mobile phone and cup, and made two advertisements for each of them. In the mobile phone group, the enhanced advertisement had a complicated background and contained more undirected information, while the preventive advertisement had a blank background and no undirected information. In the cup group, the enhanced advertisement didn’t highlight the supplementary instructions, which was presented in the endnote way, while the preventive advertisement presented the supplementary instructions in the body text. We collect 212 samples, and analyzed these data by SPSS 18.0. And all hypotheses were supported by data. Hence, when the regulatory focus is consistent with the advertisement type, the processing of information is more fluent, and higher evaluation may be made.This article enriched the application of regulatory focus theory in advertising, and offered advices for practical marketing.