A Study On The Communication Effects Of Emotional And Rational Advertising Under Different Cognitive And Affective Involvement Conditions

As a key step in marketing, advertising is paid attention by enterprises in growing numbers. Especially for consumer companies, for which the development and survival of the company relies a lot on the awareness and reputation of the brand. As a major media of communication between the company and the consumers, advertising assumes a pivotal position in the entire communication system. In order to improve communication effects, companies are focusing on delivery channels, accounting advertising costs, rich advertising content and diverse forms of advertising, all based on the target market. While millions of advertising investment has been made year by year, many advertisements end in failure. According to the Effects Hierarchy Theory of advertisement, advertising should be an interlocking process, about which the company's advertising strategies should not only cover the advertisement design, but also the compatibility of the advertisement and the product, and also audience's psychological reaction mechanisms of the advertisement, because different advertising modes usually apply to different products, generating different effects on the audience. A company should choose the suitable advertising mode by considering the features of its products and the goal of the advertising, so as to choose the right battle to fight.This thesis has examined the advertising effects of two kinds of basic advertisement (rational and emotional) on different cognitive involvement (high cognition versus low cognition) and different emotional involvement (high emotion versus low emotion). With quantitative analysis on 100 valid samples to examine effects on emotional reaction, cognitive reaction, attitude to advertisements, attitude to products and purchase inclination of collocation of different advertisements and products. A conclusion has been made based on the empirical analysis:emotional reaction, cognitive reaction and attitude to advertisements differ a lot for different advertisement modes; the practical attitude and joyfulness attitude are affected by three factors including the advertisement modes, emotional involvement and cognitive involvement; obvious diversity emerges between effects on attitude to two-dimensional products of emotional reaction and belief in products on different cognitive involvement; obvious diversity emerges in effects on purchase inclination of joyfulness attitude and practical attitude on different cognitive involvement. According to the research conclusion, the writer of this thesis holds the opinion that emotional advertisements and rational advertisements work in different ways, and different kinds of advertisement modes should be adopted with product features and marketing goals, but generally speaking, emotional advertisements outweighs rational advertisements in communication effect. Specific measures are suggested as follows: as for any kind of products, if the advertiser aims at improving the attitudes to ads in audience, emotional ads should be employed; as for the products with high emotional involvement/high cognitive involvement and high emotional involvement/low cognitive involvement, emotional ads can improve the joyfulness attitude in audience, while rational ads can improve the practical attitude in audience; as for the low emotional involvement products, including products with the low emotional involvement/high cognitive involvement and low emotional involvement/low cognitive involvement, emotional ads can improve the joyfulness attitude and practical attitude in audience; as for the high cognitive involvement products, rational ads can enhance the audience's belief in products and their practical attitudes, and practical attitudes can affect much on the audience's purchase inclination in high involvement, so rational ads can promote the purchase inclination under this condition; emotional ads tend to arouse higher emotional experience and higher joyfulness attitude in products with high cognitive involvement, however as the joyfulness attitude doesn't bring much to the purchase inclination, emotional ads don't have much effects on audience's purchase inclination; as for products of low cognitive involvement, emotional ads can inspire higher emotional experience, while the practical attitude and joyfulness attitude are easily affected by the emotional experience, of which the joyfulness attitude promotes the purchase inclination, the emotional ads can generate higher purchase inclination in audience for products of low cognitive involvement. This thesis makes analysis on the limitation of this research and also points clear the research direction in future.