How sadness in narrative advertising influences brand attitude and purchase intention of audiences

Nowadays, an increasing number of researchers begin to pay attention to the effect of emotions to consumers in advertising industry. With the development of society and life quality, more consumers would like to focus on emotional connection rather than simple external conditions. Most of researches studies how to employ positive emotions in advertising and hence enhance consumers’ attitude and behaviors. Negative emotions have been always associated with detrimental effects of advertising. Nevertheless, this study puts forward that sadness in narrative advertising, one of the negative emotions, can actually bring positive influence on consumers’ brand attitude and purchase intention, with sadness being independent variable, and brand attitude and purchase intention being dependent variables. Besides, the indispensable parts of narrative, narrative involvement and transportation, were measured as mediators to figure out how they affect the persuasion process. The research also contained two main moderators, which were empathy tendency and product involvement, to explore deeply how the effects of sadness on brand attitudes and purchase intention were moderated. Values of variables were acquired by a survey, which participants were randomly assigned to one of three narrative advertisements and answered questions. Related data were analyzed in regression model and general liner model. Based on the results, five conclusions were: (1) the sadness in narrative advertisements can positively influence brand attitude, but it has no effect on purchase intention; (2) narrative involvement functions positively towards the effect of sadness on brand attitude, but has no influence on the effect towards purchase intention; (3) transportation level has nothing to do with the effect of sadness on brand attitude and purchase intention; (4) empathy tendency doesn’t moderate the effect of sadness towards brand attitude and purchase intention whereas it negatively moderates the effect of sadness on narrative involvement; and (5) product involvement doesn’t influence the effect of sadness towards brand attitude and purchase intention.