When Pessimistic Communication Has Positive Impact On Consumer Brand Attitude

Brand communication is an important aspect of marketing.Effective brand communication can promote understanding,recognition,trust and experience of the target consumer.Most brands communicate with positive emotions or attitude,aiming at promoting positive brand attitudes by inducing positive emotions of consumers.On the contrary,very few brands use negative emotions.Existing research on emotional advertising has also been consistent with the expectation that positive emotion induce positive advertising attitudes and brand attitudes,while negative emotion lead to negative attitudes.However,the success of Negative Energy marketing has triggered our reflection on traditional ideasThrough literature review and analysis of Negative Energy statement,we believe that the Negative Energy used for brand communication is similar to the pessimistic attitude.According to different theories,research scholars have different definitions of the concept of pessimism,including Dispositional Pessimism theory and Attributional Pessimism theory.Based on this,this study divides the pessimistic content of brand communication into dispositional pessimism content and attributional pessimism content.The spread of brand emotional content will affect consumers' brand attitudes by acting on consumer's emotion.Based on the two-factor model of positive and negative emotions,the study assumes that the spread of pessimistic content will simultaneously stimulate people's negative emotions and positive emotions According to the theory of self-differentiation,we speculate that the spread of two types of pessimistic content will lead to the generation of depression and negative impact on brand attitude.And because the dispositional pessimism content may be perceived as defensive pessimistic strategy,while the attributional pessimism content makes consumers perceive similarities,both types of communication content will cause consumers to have a soothing mood and thus have a positive impact on brand attitudes.In addition,the effect of brand communication is often related to the type of relationship between the brand and the consumer,so we use this factor as a distinction to further explore the effectThis paper validates the theoretical hypothesis through three experiments.The pre-experiment aims to verify that under the communal norm,different types of pessimistic content will bring different emotional reflections to consumers.By analyzing the real data on social networking sites,we demonstrate that the classification of pessimistic content type is meaningful.The purpose of Experiment 1 is to verify whether there is an advantage in pessimistic content compared to non-pessimistic content in brand communication.Through the comparative analysis between the two groups,the results show that there is no significant advantage.Experiment 2 introduces the relationship paradigm as a regulatory variable,aiming at exploring how the match of different types of pessimistic content with different relationship norms have effect on customer's attitude and the mechanism.The results show that under the communal norm,brand attitude on attributional pessimism content is significantly improved.The result of the mediation effect test shows that the soothing mood plays a mediating role,while the mediating effect of depression was not obvious.The theoretical contributions of this study are concentrated in the following aspects.First of all,this paper is the first to study pessimistic attitudes as the content of brand communication,drawing on the Pessimism Theory in personality research.Secondly,based on the bivariate model,this study provides a reference method to understand the mechanism of the effect of some complicated emotional communication on consumer brand attitude.Fourthly,this paper introduces the relationship norms as a regulatory variable,further explaining the boundary conditions of this effect.