THE IMPACT OF EMOTIONAL ADVERTISING APPEALS ON CONSUMER IMPLICIT AND EXPLICIT MEMORY: AN ACCESSIBILITY/DIAGNOSTICITY PERSPECTIVE

Emotional advertisements have a substantial impact on consumer attitudes, as well as upon purchase intentions. However, research on the influence of emotional appeals on memory has been somewhat mixed, with some researchers asserting that they result in poor consumer memory, while others argue that if tested properly, they have a substantial impact. The current research addresses these mixed results by relying on an accessibility/diagnosticity framework to explore the effect of emotions on consumer implicit and explicit memory. Explicit memory performance is characterized as relying upon both the accessibility of memory traces and their relative diagnosticity in contrast with other inputs. In contrast, implicit memory performance is primarily driven by accessibility alone. Results from two experiments are supportive of this perspective. The first experiment demonstrates that overall emotional advertising appeals have a bigger impact on implicit versus explicit memory performance, though explicit memory performance is enhanced after exposure to an intense emotional appeal. The second experiment demonstrates that the diagnosticity of emotional appeals can be enhanced, and that such enhancement leads to better explicit memory performance under conditions of high involvement. In contrast, emotional diagnosticity is shown to have no effect on consumer implicit memory. INTRODUCTION Emotional or “feeling” advertising appeals have received considerable attention over the past decade in consumer behavior research. Past research has focused on the specific types of emotional appeals frequently used (Stayman, Aaker and Bruzzone 1989), as well as the effects of emotional appeals on consumer advertisement and brand attitudes, as well as purchase intentions (e.g., Burke and Edell 1987, Batra and Ray 1986). However, research examining the impact of emotional advertising appeals on more cognitivebased effects such as consumer memory has been somewhat mixed; some researchers have shown that the use of emotion of persuasion appeals results in poor consumer memory (e.g., Zielske 1982), while others argue that if tested properly, emotions may have a substantial effect on memory (e.g., Friestad and Thorson 1993). As a result, the impact of emotions on memory in persuasion contexts is not clearly understood. The objective of this research is to address these mixed results by relying on an accessibilitydiagnosticity model (Feldman and Lynch 1987) to explore the impact of emotions on both implicit and explicit memory. Thus far, research has focused upon measuring explicit memory for emotional advertisements, ignoring their potential impact upon consumers’ implicit memory (Schacter 1987). However, while emotional traces stored in memory may be accessible, they may not be particularly diagnostic when consumers engage in the effortful, strategic searches of memory necessary for explicit memory performance, and thus may be “outshone” by other cues (Smith 1988). In contrast, however, these traces may have a substantial impact upon implicit memory, which requires no assessments of diagnosticity, instead relying entirely upon accessibility. Moreover, researchers have argued that emotional experiences might often be more implicit or unconscious in nature (Kihlstrom 1993), which suggests, in accordance with the encoding specificity principle, that investigations of the effects of such ads on implicit memory may shed light on previously conflicting results by tapping into the unconscious effects of emotions on memory. This paper reports the outcome of two experiments designed to investigate the potential impact of emotional advertising appeals upon consumer implicit versus explicit memory. The first experiment explores the impact of advertising appeals of varying degrees of emotional intensity upon both implicit and explicit memory. Experiment 2 extends these results, investigating the degree to which the diagnosticity of intense emotional experiences can be heightened, via relevance of an emotional appeal to the advertised product, thus improving consumer explicit memory for emotional persuasion appeals, particularly under conditions of high involvement. ADVERTISING APPEALS AND THE USE OF EMOTIONi As a result of calls to give greater attention to emotional and experiential aspects of consumer behavior (Zajonc 1980, Holbrook and Hirschman 1982), the importance of affective responses to advertisements, and their impact upon both attitudes and choice processes has become increasingly clear. A large number of advertisements can be characterized by their emotional aspects (Stayman, Aaker and Bruzzone 1989), and emotional responses are central to consumers’ perceptions of and reactions to advertisements (Aaker and Bruzzone 1981). Much of this research has focused on psychological theories of affective experience to determine the types of emotions that may be evoked in persuasion appeals. For example, one common finding in both the basic emotion literature which focuses on emotional responses to general stimuli (e.g., Izard 1977; Mehrabian and Russell 1974; Plutchik 1980) and the emotion literature in consumer behavior which focuses on emotional responses to advertising appeals Batra and Ray (1986; Burke and Edell 1989; Edell and Burke 1987; Mehrabian and Russell 1974), is that three general types of emotional responses exist. Two of the emotional responses appear to be positive (one typified by more arousing emotions such as surprise, elation and joy, and the other by more soothing emotions such as warmth, hope and gentleness), while the third is negative. Based on these specific emotional responses, researchers have focused on the types of consequences that they yield. Batra and Ray (1986), for example, expanded the traditional coding of thought protocols to include not only cognitive responses to appeals (Wright 1973), but emotional responses. Importantly, these emotional responses accounted for significant levels of variance in advertisement attitudes, over and above that provided by the traditional cognitive responses. Further, such emotional responses can also directly impact brand attitudes and purchase intentions (e.g., Stayman and Aaker 1988, Edell and Burke 1987, Burke and Edell 1989). Importantly, in this literature stream, a distinction has been made between emotions depicted in the advertisement and those actually felt by the consumer viewing the advertisement (Aaker and Stayman 1989). While depicted and felt emotions often coincide, there are also conditions in which they are discrete, such as in the case of upbeat emotional responses (Stout, Homer and Liu 1990). In contrast, depicted and felt emotions tend to be highly related in the case of warm emotional responses (e.g., depicted relaxed emotions are highly correlated with felt relaxed emotions; Burke and Edell 1987). This variation in the level of correspondence between the constructs may have to do with differences in arousal. Relative to warm emotional responses, upbeat emotional responses tend to be more highly arousing. In such conditions, the cognitive appraisal processes may be more likely to be distinct from the actual emotional experience (Lazarus 1982) . Conversely, in conditions where the emotional experience is characterized by low levels of arousal, the cognitive appraisal processes may be quite similar to the actual experience. In this research, we focus on conditions where depicted and felt emotions highly correspond, but the construct of most interest is felt or experienced emotions. The Impact of Emotional Advertising Appeals on Consumer Memory While previous work has demonstrated the importance of emotional responses upon advertising effectiveness as conceptualized by attitudes and purchase intentions, advertising practitioners are often interested in other measures of advertising effectiveness, such as recall (Lynch and Srull 1982, Krishnan and Chakravarti 1993). In this domain, the impact of “feeling” advertisements is much less clear. A number of researchers have found that emotional advertisements often do not perform well on measures such as day-after recall (Zielske 1982), suggesting that emotional responses evoked by advertisements are poor retrieval cues compared to cognitive responses, and resulting in widespread practitioner belief that emotional commercials do poorly in standard memory tests (Berger 1981). In contrast, others have shown that emotional advertisements do have a recall advantage, at least under retrieval conditions which encourage search of episodic memory (Friestad and Thorson 1986, 1993, Thorson and Friestad 1989, Thorson and Page 1988). Asserting that advertisements are encoded into episodic memory (i.e., the mental storage of personal experiences and their spatial and temporal context), with a trace that can be strengthened via the experience of emotional arousal, they show that the typical semantic retrieval cues (i.e. product category cues) contained in the customary cued recall measures are generally inappropriate, and lead to poor recall performance for emotional appeals. In contrast, free recall, an episodic memory task, as well as the use of executional or experiential cues (i.e., “Recall the ad that featured the grandfather playing with his grandson.”) appear to lead to faster, higher recall for emotional advertisements (Friestad and Thorson 1986, 1993). However, even in this body of work, the impact of emotional advertising appeals on consumer memory has been somewhat unreliable (Page, Thorson and Heide 1990). The apparently inconsistent impact of emotional advertisements upon consumer memory implies that the role of feelings in memory may not be appropriately conceptualized. Nearly all of the previous work on this topic has conceptualized emotional responses stored in memory as available to the conscious or intentional retrieval processes tapped by traditional, explicit measures of memory. However, examination of a wide variet