The Role of Emotions in Advertising: A Call to Action

Emotions play a central role in advertising. Starting from the extensive and ever-developing literature on the role of emotions in human information processing and behavior, as studied within general psychology, we discuss how advertising literature has tackled this topic throughout the years. This review reveals that the potential of direct behavioral effects of discrete integral emotions, meaning specific emotions evoked by an advertising message, has remained underexploited. After specifying this research gap, we outline the theoretical rationale behind this behavioral approach and sketch challenges and opportunities to address the potential of discrete emotions and their advertising-relevant behavioral outcomes. We thereby take advantage of the nature of digital media environments and recent methodological advances in this context. We provide guidelines to apply this rationale in advertising research, discuss its strength in comparison with current practice and its potential to extend to incidental emotions, and consider the ethical implications of our proposal.