Correspondence: Li-Wei Mai, Westminster Business School, University of Westminster, London, UK

¹is, known as Donna Mai, Senior Lecturer in Marketing and Acting Director of the Centre for Research in Marketing at Westminster Business School, University of Westminster. She teaches Marketing Research at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. She has published extensively in the area of consumer behaviour. Her research interests are in consumer studies, particularly in the issues related to personal and psychological influences on consumers' choice and consumption.

²is MA in Marketing Management from the University of Westminster. Being a young researcher, she is very interested in using innovative designs and methods in applied consumer research. Her research interest is in the area of the influences on consumers' emotions and decision-making.

Received 5 January 2009; Revised 5 January 2009.

Abstract

This paper aims to identify the effect of selected advertising on consumers by assessing their emotions, attitudes, understanding and memory. An online survey combined with experimentation design was conducted among people aged 20 or over. Four selected TV commercials were used in the experiment, and the measurements of emotions, attitudes and memorability were calculated based on variables derived from previous studies. A final sample of 120 respondents was used for analysis. The result shows that different levels of emotions such as warmth, love, longing and desire, happiness and amusement were elicited by different TV commercials. The most memorable advertisements were those that evoked the most positive feelings and were the best understood. However, in this study none of the commercials scored higher than three out of five for memorability. This reflects an overload of media exposure in modern society, meaning that most advertisements have limited impact. Age was found to significantly affect a person's interpretation and emotional experience of a TV commercial.