Shaping consumer purchase and experience with paradoxical marketing

In today's cluttered retail environment, some brands employ “paradoxical” marketing—deliberately juxtaposing mismatched elements—to stand out and intrigue consumers. This study investigates whether and how deliberately incongruent brand communication can outperform conventional strategies in eliciting consumer engagement and fostering positive brand attitudes, particularly through heightened novelty and deeper cognitive elaboration. Five experiments (total N = 5887) were conducted across diverse conditions, including immersive virtual-reality simulations, online surveys, and branding workshops, to manipulate congruent versus incongruent marketing stimuli and test our hypotheses. The results showed that careful mismatches significantly increased consumer excitement and brand evaluations by enhancing novelty and elaborative processing. These gains were strongest for individuals with large self–ideal discrepancies or high tolerance for ambiguity and persisted mainly for hedonic products and successful campaigns, reversing for utilitarian goods and failed initiatives. Conceptually, our findings demonstrate that paradoxical branding engages consumers via dual pathways—an affective “surprise” response and deeper analytical processing—linking schema-incongruity theory with the elaboration-likelihood model. Thus, marketers can break through advertising clutter by introducing unexpected contrasts in their campaigns—for example, adding humor to a serious message or forging unlikely partnerships—to capture attention and prolong consumer interest.