UF Study: Americans More Likely To Let Their Emotions Do The Buying

August 1, 2002

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — People really do let their emotions get the better of them when it comes to buying products sold in the consumer-driven U.S. economy, a new University of Florida study shows.

The national study shows that no matter what people may presume, feelings and emotions, not Spock-like logic, drive consumers to make even big-ticket purchases, said Jon Morris, an advertising professor in UF’s College of Journalism and Communications.

Emotions were nearly twice as important as knowledge in buying decisions, according to the nationwide study, which analyzed the responses of 23,168 people to 240 advertising messages in 13 categories, including a broad range of products ranging from durables such as cars and appliances to groceries and other nondurables. The results appear in the current issue of the Journal of Advertising Research released this week.

The findings – based on a considerably more sophisticated assessment tool to measure advertising reactions than has been used previously – refute past research, which demonstrates strong support for the idea that knowledge and believability determine whether consumers are interested in products and intend to buy them, Morris said.

“There has always been the argument that emotions are a factor in consumers’ buying decisions, but this is the first proof that emotions are a strong driver of whether people will buy a broad range of products,” Morris said. “If you ask someone why they’re buying a Lexus, they may say it’s the brake system or some design feature. The real reason is the kind of emotional judgment they’ve made about the car,” he said.

If marketers take these findings to heart, it could have implications for the kind of ads and commercials people see, Morris said. Products such as computers typically touted for their technical capabilities and features may instead be extolled for their emotional benefits, he said.

“With the exception of the new Dell ads, which show an appealing young, male character representing the Dell image, computer companies have never really sold computers based on their emotional payoffs,” he said. “Instead, they emphasize qualities like the size of the hard drive, how much memory it has or how speedy it is.”

That doesn’t mean effective advertising has to tug on heartstrings. It means marketers should focus more on understanding how to connect with their audiences on emotional as well as intellectual levels, Morris said.

The findings should compel buyers to recognize they are strongly swayed by emotions as they are contemplating purchases.

“If you’ve always used a product, you’re emotionally attached to continuing to buy it. Unfortunately, that’s what we all do,” Morris said. “Buyers need to realize that feelings play a strong role in purchasing decisions, get a hold of that emotion and balance it with facts and information in order to make judgments about a product.”

The study was conducted using a new marketing communications technique called AdSAM. Developed by Morris, it incorporates a graphic character called the Self-Assessment Manikin that was used to assess participants’ ranges of pleasure, arousal and dominance. On each of these three scales, respondents were asked to mark the dot below the manikins that best represented their feelings after seeing an advertisement. A company that specializes in analyzing commercials conducted the tests at malls around the country. The responses then were analyzed by Morris and three UF advertising doctoral students.

“Fifteen or 20 years ago, there was a strong movement in the marketing field to determine how people’s feelings affected their buying decisions, but that fell out of favor because nobody could figure out how to measure this connection between how people felt about things and what effect it has on their buying intentions,” he said.

In addition to consumer research, the new testing mechanism could be used in a variety of health, human resources and educational fields, Morris said. For example, it could gauge how people feel about certain teaching methods or different treatment options for drug and alcohol abuse, he said.

“This is probably one of the most definitive pieces of work that has examined the role emotion plays in driving behavioral measures,” said William Dillon, the Herman W. Lay professor of marketing and statistics at the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “In the past, conventional pencil-and-paper methods, although seemingly capturing affect, may indeed be capturing cognition. The type of measurement that Morris uses is one that more closely gets at emotional reaction.”