想像，讓你付諸行動 ：感性訴求廣告中不同心理模擬之效果研究

Nowadays, in advertising practices, it is common to observe that practitioners try to improve the audience’s attitudinal responses and purchase intentions through evoking specific emotions by the use of emotional appeals. Among various emotional appeals, sex appeals and humor appeals are heavily used. Related research reveal that these two emotional appeals can successfully attract the attention of consumers, but their effects on affecting procut-related memory, cognition, and behavioral intentions are not as good as expected. How to improve the effects of emotional appeals is the considerable concern of practitioners. This study suggests that adding different designs in advertisements (i.e., cognitive-oriented mental simulation) might strengthen the link of consumers toward the advertised product. Accordingly, this study explores which types of mental simulation should be used to generate better advertising effects in different types of emotional appeal advertising. Moreover, it also examines the possible moderation of product involvement and compares relative effects of different types of emotional appeal advertising. This study conducts a 2 (mental simulation: process-focused vs. outcome-focused) x 2 (types of advertising appeals: sex vs. humor) x 2 (product involvement: high vs. low) between-subjects factorial experiment to test five hypotheses. The analytical results reveal the following. (1) In emotional appeal advertising, adding the mechanism of mental simulation can produce better advertising effectiveness. Additionally, outcome-focused mental simulation has better effects than does process-focused mental simuation. (2) Humor appeals (compared to sex appeals) can generate better ad attitudes. (3) Sex appeal advertising using outcome- focused mental simulation generates better effects, while using process-focused or outcome-oriented mental simulation generates equivalent effects in humor appeal advertising. (4) High-involvement products using process-focused mental simulation and low-involvement products using outcome-focused mental simulation have better advertising effects. (5) In different combinations of advertising-appeal types and product involvement, the relative effects of the types of mental simulation are diversified. The research results contribute to understanding the effects of adding the cognitive mechanism (i.e., mental simulation) in emotional appeal advertising. Additionally, it helps to clarify the relative effects between process-focused and outcome-focused mental simulation by considering the moderation of emotional appeals and product involvement. It also provides practical implications on how to select effective emotional appeals and how to determine the types of mental simulation used in the ads depending on different emotional appeals and products with varying involvement.