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Humor is used to sell products, but there are many types of humor and different kinds are used most effectively with different media. This article looks at various kinds of humor and how often they're used in print and television advertisements, helping managers determine when - and when not - to use humor.
Introduction
Humor is often used in print and television media to sell products. How effecfive is it? It depends on how you look at it. While it's used frequently, humor in advertising remains controversial. On the one hand, humor has been credited with calling attention to an advertisement [8,9,15], increasing comprehension of the ad [15], contributing to the positive attitude toward the ad [1,3,4] and enhancing the positive attitude toward the advertised product [4]. On the other hand, the use of humor may not be suitable for certain products or services, is thought to lead to faster advertising "wear out" [16], may offend some members of the audience and may result in the so-called "vampire effect," where the humor sucks attention away from the advertised product/message [2,14].
When deciding whether to use humor, therefore, it's important to think about your audience, your message, your medium, your product and, last but not least, the type of humor. This last component has been overlooked in most of the research previously done on advertising in the media, but could prove helpful to decision makers.
As previous research has revealed [17,18], our study shows that humor is used more frequently in television commercials than print advertisements. For the most part, however, previous research has lumped all of "humor" into one, indiscriminant category. In this article, we will look at different types of humor and which types are used most by which media. The main purpose of this study is to help managerial decision makers use humor most effectively by considering the types of humor available to them.
Seven Reasons To Laugh
In a nutshell, our study set out to determine whether the type of humor used in advertising varies by medium. We found that it does, which suggests that managers should definitely consider the type of humor as a variable in their decision to use - or not use - humor in their particular...