Effects of background music on consumers' cognitive responses in TV advertising

Abstract

880-01The purpose of this thesis is to examine the effects of background music on consumers`` information processing in the TV advertising context. Although most of the research literature has focused on emotional responses to ad music, it is important to study music``s impact on cognitive responses because creating positive feelings during ad exposure may be desirable but have little impact unless the brand and message are remembered. Therefore, the current research examines the impact of background music on consumers`` ad memory performance. This study investigates consumers`` cognitive responses at two different stages of message processing. One is the stage of consumers`` message encoding. The other is the stage of consumers`` message retrieval. Chapter 2 and 3 examine the effect of background music on the acquisition of advertising messages whereas Chapter 4 investigates its cueing effect on the retrieval of the advertising messages. Chapter 2 examines effects of tempo and familiarity of background music on consumers`` message encoding in TV advertising. Based on the resource matching rationale stating that encoding of a message is maximized when the resources demanded by the processing task match those people are able to make available, this study predicts an inverted-U shape relationship between the tempo and message recall. The prediction is fully supported when familiar music is used, but not when unfamiliar music is used in the background. Possible explanations of the results are offered and their implications are discussed. Chapter 3 attempts to find out which characteristics of background music may have a facilitative effect on consumers`` message encoding. Hypotheses are suggested based on two premises. First, increase of information load due to music should be reduced as much as possible. Second, music should assist consumers to receive ad messages more easily. This chapter suggests that both of those two premises are necessary for ad music to hav...