Effects of Three Humorous Advertising Techniques on Purchase Intention

Abstract

The number of varied advertisements makes each brand or company need to find suitable ways and methods to package its advertisements to attract consumers. One form of method that can be done is the use of humorous advertisements. The goal of this research is to compare the effects of three humorous advertisement techniques on college students’ purchase intention. This experimental study used between-participants posttest-only design. 108 college students were recruited using the simple random sampling technique and were assigned to three different experimental groups with 36 participants in each group. These three experimental groups were given self-made humorous advertisements with different techniques (arousal-safety, incongruity-resolution, and humorous disparagement). The advertisements were 30-seconds long, for a made-up brand, a strawberry flavored milk drink. Then, they were given a purchase intent scale to measure their purchase intention of the advertised product. The results showed all three experimental groups are at neutral or slightly disagree to have the intention to purchase the advertised product. The hypothesis test was done using One-Way Anova. No significant differences were found between three humorous advertisement techniques. Possible explanations for this result are presented in this study.