Personality and Ad-Evoked Feelings: The Case for Extraversion and Neuroticism

Abstract

Feeling responses to advertisements have been identified as important advertising effects. Considerable inter subject variance has been noted across those ad-evoked feelings. Conceptual models have proposed individual differences, including personality, as antecedents of ad evoked feelings. In the psychology literature, extraversion and neuroticism have been shown to predict positive and negative affect, respectively. The current research proposes and tests relationships between extraversion and neuroticism and specific, transient feeling responses to ads. Additionally, the single trait affect intensity, an alternative construal of individual differences in affective predispositions, is measured and compared with extraversion and neuroticism. Extraversion and neuroticism appear to be preferable, theoretically grounded predictors of ad evoked feelings and consequent consumer attitudes. These findings should advance advertising managers' understandings of differences across consumers in fundamental patterns of feeling responses to advertising.