HUMOR APPEAL IN ADVERTISING: HOW TO USE IT EFFECTIVELY

Abstract

Advertising has a great influence on our lives. Today’s advertisements also inform and guide many of the important decisions we make. The way in which advertisements are affecting and shaping our attitudes, lifestyles and culture are too many to tally. (Berger, 2001) Businesses spend lots of money every year to create humorous prime time TV advertisements because advertisements practitioners believe that humor is an effective means to gain attention in advertisements. According to Weinberger and Gulas (1992) while the use of humor is high, the efficiency of humor as a communications device remains uncertain. It attempts to delineate its impact; humor has proven to be very elusive. Humor is not, and never has been, a magic wave of increasing numbers of humorous advertisements that may lead one into overstating the case for humor in advertising. It is important to understand that humor can be appropriate and effective in some situations and not in others. This lack of knowledge has led advertising copywriters and researchers alike to both praise and decry the effectiveness of humor appeal in advertising as evidenced in the opening discussions. Several dozen studies on humor appeal in advertising have been conducted over the past 50 years. Systematic analysis of scientific research studies of Beard (2008), Catanescu (2001), Vuorela (2005), Polik (2010), Moorthy and Zhao (2000) and others on using humor appeal in advertising let us state that understanding the impact of humor is difficult and there is no common approach on its effectiveness. Therefore a scientific problem can be formulated in a question: how to use humor appeal in advertising effectively? Research object: using humor appeal in advertising. The objective of the article: to perform theoretical study of using humor appeal in advertising and to base the main aspects of its effectiveness. Research methods: The theoretical study was performed by employing comparative analysis and systematic methods of scientific literature. Research results. Generalizing the results of theoretical study can be stated that the main aspects having influence on effectiveness of humor appeal in advertising are as follows: the nature of the product, target audience factors, the humorous message content and cross cultural differences. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.em.17.3.2132