How People Respond to Different Types of Humorous Advertising

Aims: This study examined the different types of humorous advertising on attitude toward advertising and brand in order to analyze the effect on brand recognition and brand recall.

Study Design: This study focused on three types of humorous advertisings: cognitive, affective, and social orientation, and used an experimental method to understand the influence of humorous advertisements on advertising attitude and brand communication effects.

Place and Duration of Study: The study was conducted in companies in the city of Taipei, Taiwan, between May and June 2012.

Methodology: This study used a 4 (affective, cognitive, social and non-humorous advertising) × 2 (low and high degree of advertising involvement) between-subjects factorial experimental design and the group of non-humorous advertisings as control groups. A total of 268 subjects were randomly and equally assigned to one of the four ads. Removing 28 copies of unusable questionnaires because of incomplete answers, 240 copies of the questionnaires were usable, resulting in a response rate of nearly 90%.

Results: Findings indicate that humorous advertisings do promote brand message comprehension, and are superior to those of non-humorous advertising. In addition, the results indicate that different types of humorous advertising have different effects on brand recognition and brand recall.

Conclusion: The different types of humorous ads have statistically significant differences on various dimensions of brand communication. The humorous advertising of affective has greater brand recall than those of the humorous advertisings of social and cognitive. Furthermore, presenting an advertisement with humorous elements can transfer the consumers’ positive perceptions on the advertising to the brand itself, thus achieving effective brand communication.