Humour in advertising : the effect of humour on attitude towards the advert, the brand and intention to buy

Abstract

The overwhelming amount of advertising messages that bombard consumers in today's world, has led to a highly competitive and creative force driving the advertising industry. This dissertation focuses on humour in advertising and how marketers can use it as a tool to create positive attitudes towards an advert and a brand. These ideas were the premise for the research undertaken for this study which compares a humorous advert to a non humorous advert for different brands from two product categories, to test whether the humorous adverts generate more positive attitudes towards the advert and brand than the non humorous adverts. Two other hypotheses were also tested; that humorous adverts produce higher intention to buy than non humorous adverts and that persons with a higher Need for Humour (NFH) will assess humorous adverts more positively than persons lower in NFH. This quantitative approach tested a sample of men and women aged 18 to 35 and found that while the humorous adverts did perform as expected it was not consistent throughout the experiment. This is due to the moderating role of prior brand evaluation (Chattopadhyay and Basu 1990) which appears to have influenced respondents' replies. Contrary to expectations, NFH appeared to have no effect on how the sample rated the humorous adverts.