Impact of Information Processing Style on Advertising Effectiveness

High advertising effectiveness has become pertinent today with escalating media costs and greater competition among marketers. This paper tests whether an advertisement can be more persuasive if its appeal aligns with the type of advertisement processing by the target audience. Specifically, it was assessed whether individuals vary in their tendency to use the two processing styles e.g. cognition and affect, to process advertisement information. Moreover, it was assessed whether the affective and cognitive processing styles are independent and yet can operate interactively. These were tested across high and low involvement products to ensure greater generalizability of the results. This research found that cognitive and affective processing may take place independently as well as interactively, though in varying extents and sequences, and advertising effectiveness is higher if its appeal matches with the processing styles of the target audience. Additionally, differences in consumers’ response to ad appeals across FMCG and durables have been established.