The Effects of Verbal and Non-Verbal Features on the Reception of DRTV Commercials

Abstract

Analyses of consumer response are important for successful advertising as they help advertisers to find new, original and successful ways of persuasion. Successful advertisements have to boost the product’s benefits but they also have to appeal to consumers’ emotions. In TV advertisements, this is done by means of verbal and non-verbal strategies. The paper presents the results of an empirical investigation whose purpose was to examine the viewers’ emotional responses to a DRTV commercial induced by different verbal and non-verbal features, the amount of credibility and persuasiveness of the commercial and its general acceptability. Our findings indicate that (1) an overload of the same verbal and non-verbal information decreases persuasion; and (2) highly marked prosodic delivery is either exaggerated or funny, while the speaker is perceived as annoying.