| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立中山大學 === 行銷傳播管理研究所 === 103 === Advertising is now ubiquitous. Advertisements exert a key influence on the purchasing decisions of most consumers. Marketers thus use various types of advertising to communicate product benefits and enhance consumer product attitudes and purchase intentions. This paper addresses the mechanism by which advertisements induce mental simulation in consumers, who process the received advertising messages. The use of advertising pictures and copies to evoke different types of mental simulation was investigated to explore the effect of visual product depictions and types of advertising on advertising effectiveness. The possible moderating effect of product types and the impact of different types of spokespersons were also explored.
Three experiments were conducted to test the research hypotheses. The research results indicate the following key findings. (1) Match of visual product depiction would lead to better attitudinal resposnes compared with mismatch. (2) Narrative advertising (vs. argument advertising) can induce more mental simulation and generate better advertising effects. (3) The interactive effects between visual product depictions and advertising types are changeable, depending on whether the viewpoint of two sources of mental simulation is conflicted. Additionally, the combination of visual description and advertising types has higher explanatory power on mental simulation effect within utilitarian products compared with hedonic products. (4) Mental simulation mediates the advertising effects. (5) Spokespersons and human-like spokescharacters, compared with animal-like ones, can induce more mental simulation and lead to better product attitudes. (6) The relative effect of spokesperson types was moderated by visual product depictions and advertising types.
Research results enhance the understanding of using advertisements to induce mental simulation, and enrich the studies on visual product depictions as well as spokesperson types. The findings can also guide advertisers regarding the appropriate use of advertising elements to induce mental simulation in consumers when advertising various types of products, and provide suggestions on the selection of spokesperson types to increase advertising effectiveness.
|
|---|
