Sansone Martina, Balconi Michela
International Research Center for Cognitive Applied Neuroscience (IrcCAN), Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, 20123 Milan, Italy.
Research Unit in Affective and Social Neuroscience, Department of Psychology, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, 20123 Milan, Italy.
Brain Sci. 2022 May 3;12(5):593. doi: 10.3390/brainsci12050593.
In pandemic times, taking advantage of COVID-19-elicited emotions in commercials has been a popular tactic employed by corporations to build successful consumer engagement and, hopefully, increase sales. The present study investigates whether COVID-19-related emotional communication affects the consumer's emotional response and the approach/avoidance motivation toward the brand-measured as a function of brain hemodynamic changes-as well as the purchase intentions. The functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) was employed to record neural correlates from the prefrontal cortex while the experimental and control groups were observing respectively COVID-19-related and unrelated advertisements (ads). The hemodynamic patterns suggest that COVID-19-related ads may promote deeper emotional elaboration, shifting consumers' attention from the semantic meaning to the affective features and perhaps supporting a more favorable brand evaluation. Conversely, purchase intentions were only related to the pre-existing level of brand engagement. The findings suggest that leveraging the negative emotional potential of COVID-19 may not shift the explicit purchase intentions but could nonetheless boost emotional engagement, benefitting the final evaluation of the brand at an implicit level.
在疫情期间，利用新冠疫情引发的情绪进行广告宣传，一直是企业采用的一种流行策略，旨在建立成功的消费者参与度，并有望提高销售额。本研究调查了与新冠疫情相关的情感沟通是否会影响消费者的情绪反应，以及作为大脑血液动力学变化函数来衡量的对品牌的趋近/回避动机，以及购买意愿。在实验组和对照组分别观看与新冠疫情相关和无关的广告时，采用功能性近红外光谱技术（fNIRS）记录前额叶皮层的神经关联。血液动力学模式表明，与新冠疫情相关的广告可能会促进更深入的情感加工，将消费者的注意力从语义意义转移到情感特征上，也许还会支持更有利的品牌评价。相反，购买意愿只与品牌参与的预先存在水平有关。研究结果表明，利用新冠疫情的负面情绪潜力可能不会改变明确的购买意愿，但仍可以提高情感参与度，在隐性层面有利于品牌的最终评价。
