Emotions Make Your Narratives Fly: The Effect of Strength of Emotions on the Effectiveness of Narrative Advertising

Abstract

In recent decades, a way to influence consumer decisions without providing arguments has gained attention: the use of emotional narratives in advertisements. Such narratives can be described by numerous abstract (e.g., realness of the plot) and concrete characteristics (e.g., length, happy or sad ending, degree of product integration in the story). We focus on an abstract characteristic that has gained no attention thus far: the emotionality of the narrative, i.e., the degree to which the narrative advertisement elicits emotions. We start by providing examples from such advertisements in practice. Then, we provide an overview of theories considering the condition in which a priming stimulus (in our case, anarrative advertisement) triggers more or less intense emotions, which might influence the evaluation of a target stimulus (in our case, the promoted brand or the recommended behavior). Subsequently, we present findings from new studies on the relationship of the strength of emotions triggered by narratives to the evaluations of brands or recommended behavior. We manipulate the emotionality of videos by using different background music while holding the visual elements constant. Our findings show that the strength of emotions has a positive impact on evaluations.