敘事廣告效果之研究

Abstract

愛聽故事是人的天性，許多廠商在廣告中藉助故事的力量去影響消費者的情感和思想，例如：在廣告中用故事來說明消費者使用產品後所帶來的利益；像這種在廣告中說故事的廣告類型，就是敘事廣告。 本研究致力於瞭解敘事廣告的訊息處理過程，主要聚焦於三方面。一方面透過產品論點品質強弱是否會因廣告敘事與否而有差異，瞭解受測者對於同一個廣告內各種資訊的選擇與處理模式。一方面探討不同的敘事廣告呈現型式的說服過程。亦即敘事廣告效果的中介變項，是否會因為敘事呈現型式為文字或圖片而有差異。此外，根據資源相配適假說的觀點，探討四種廣告類型 (圖片敘事、圖片非敘事、文字敘事、文字非敘事) 的說服效果，與消費者消費者認知需求程度的關係。 研究採用兩個受試者間實驗設計法，統計採變異數分析、sobel檢驗、迴歸分析法檢驗假說。共731位受測者參與實驗。研究結果大致符合預期，研究發現如下： 一、受測者會處理非敘事廣告內的產品論點訊息，進而使得產品論點品質影響廣告及產品的評估。但在敘事廣告時，受測者的注意力會被故事所吸引、忽略產品論點，而是透過故事影響廣告及產品的評價。 二、文字與圖片敘事廣告的說服過程是不相同的。文字敘事廣告說服效果的中介因素為專注情節，但對於圖片敘事廣告而言，專注情節並未扮演該廣告說服效果的中介因素，可能是提供相對應影像的圖片故事，減少受測者運用影像能力處理故事的需要，而降低專注情節發生的可能性。 三、在面對最難處理的文字非敘事廣告時，受測者的認知需求程度越高，文字非敘事廣告的說服效果越好，呈現正向直線關係。當處理難度居中的圖片非敘事廣告與文字敘事廣告時，受測者認知需求程度與廣告說服效果間，呈現倒U型關係。最後，在面對最容易處理的圖片敘事廣告時，受測者認知需求程度與廣告說服效果間，呈現U型關係。

People love to hear stories by nature. Many advertisers affect consumers’ emotions and thoughts through the influence of storytelling. For example, the advertisers use to explain the gains consumers can achieve by using their products. This kind of ads that conveys the core message by telling a story is narrative advertising. The present study investigates the information processing for narrative ads and focuses on three issues. The first issue is to understand how participants process the elements in narrative ads by examining whether the argument strength is a determinant of the effectiveness of narrative ads. The second issue is how the presentation format of the story (verbal versus visual) influences participants’ information processing. Specifically, the mediation process of a verbally presented ad story may differ from that of a pictorially presented ad story. The third issue is to examine the relationship between participants’ need for cognition and the persuasive effects of four ad types (verbal narrative, verbal non-narrative, visual narrative, visual non-narrative) on the basis of resource-matching hypothesis. Two between-subject experiments were held in this study. Analysis of variance (ANOVA), sobel test, and regressions were applied to test the hypotheses. Seven hundred and thirty-one participants attended the two experiments. The results support the hypotheses as follows: First, argument strength may be an important antecedent of advertising effects for non-narrative ads. When an advertisement contains a story, the story influences ad attitude and product evaluation more than the product arguments do. Second, participants’ information processes differ when an ad story presentation is in either verbal or visual formats. For the verbal narrative ad, transportation mediates the attitude formation processes. For the visual narrative ad, transportation is not the mediator of the effect of visual narratives on product evaluations because the images in the ad reduce the need for the participants to employ their imagery ability to process the story, and thus decrease the likelihood for transportation to occur. Third, there is a positive linear relationship between the need for cognition of participants and the persuasion effect of verbal non-narrative ads, which is resource-demanding. For the moderate resources-required visual non-narrative and verbal narrative ads, the relationship between the participants’ need for cognition and the persuasion effects of ad is inverse U shape. For the least resources-required visual narrative ads, the relationship between the participants’ need for cognition and the persuasion effects of ad is U shape.