The Risk of Omitting Warmth Or Competence Information in Ads

ABSTRACT

Researchers have shown that consumers perceive brands, as they do people, on the basis of two dimensions: warmth and competence. Hedonic brands therefore try to create a pleasant experience for the customer, highlighting the warmth dimension, whereas utilitarian brands emphasize the competence dimension. Research on the innuendo effect has shown that if a person is described positively in terms of only one dimension, people make negative inferences about the other dimension. The current study provides evidence that this effect also emerges in the advertising context—that is, when a brand is described only with one of the two dimensions.