The effects of imagery-evoking radio advertising strategies on affective responses

Abstract

A debate in the marketing literature concerning the relative effectiveness of various imagery‐evoking strategies in influencing consumer responses to advertising has been unresolved. This study examined the effects of three imagery‐evoking strategies commonly used in radio advertising—sound effects, vivid verbal messages, and instructions to imagine—in influencing mental imagery, ad‐evoked feelings, and attitude toward the ad. The theoretical basis for the study is an imagery model based on propositional representations theory. Consistent with the implications of the theory, of the three strategies, sound effects had the greatest impact on imagery and affective responses. Compared with sound effects, a vivid verbal message had a slightly weaker influence. Instructions to imagine, however, had a very weak impact on imagery and no significant influence on affect. Finally, the results indicated that the three strategies interacted with one another. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

I Saw It on the Radio: The Allocation of Attention to High-Imagery Radio Advertisements

“…If people consciously allocate more cognitive resources to high-imagery ads than are required to encode the ad into memory, that means that more cognitive resources may be available for other cognitive tasks such as storing information from the ad in memory. Indeed, previous research has demonstrated that high-imagery advertisements are more memorable than low-imagery advertisements (Miller & Marks 1997;Unnava, Agarwal, & Haugtvedt 1996).…”

“…Imagery was conceptualized as a characteristic of advertisements that elicits imagery processing. Previous research has manipulated imagery through the presence or absence of production features known to elicit imagery processing (e.g., Miller & Marks, 1997). This type of manipulation of imagery is feasible for experiments where researchers produce their own stimulus messages.…”

“…Bone and Ellen (1992) concluded that production features of advertisements that are capable of evoking imagery processing include direct instructions to imagine, the use of descriptive or concrete language, and sound effects. Advertising researchers have uncovered generally positive effects of imagery and imagery processing on important advertising outcomes such as attitudes toward the advertisement, attention, and memory (Babin & Burns, 1997;Bone & Ellen, 1992;Miller & Marks, 1997;Unnava, Agarwal, & Haugtvedt, 1996). Clearly, high imagery advertisements can be effective at achieving advertising objectives; however, the specific cognitive processes that may underlie the positive effects of high-imagery advertisements are not well understood.…”

System design effects on online impulse buying

“…The rationale is that the vivid presentation hinders the individual's allocation of processing resources in making decisions, increasing positive affective responses (Shiv and Fedorikhin 1999). Miller and Marks (1997) compare the vividness of different imagery-evoking strategies in the radio ads, i.e., sound effects, vivid verbal message, and instructions to imagine. Their empirical results confirm the positive relationship between vividness and pleasant feelings.…”

“…Usually, information with animation, flash, audio, video or presented with colorful language is more vivid than that without additional sensory stimuli (Miller and Marks 1997;Steuer 1992). Empirical evidence shows that animated web advertising elicits stronger orienting responses (Lang et al 2002), faster click-through (Li and Bukovac 1999), and higher arousal (Heo and Sundar 2000) than the static ads.…”