The Influence of Background Music ncongruity and Indexicality on Advertising

Nowadays, in order to build a deep and surprising impression in consumers'' mind , more and more firms are starting to use the「incongruity」method in advertisement. What’s more, the use of high indexicality background music in advertisement also becomes a very popular marketing strategy. The purpose of this research is to find out the influence of background music-message incongruity and music indexicality on perceived humor、positive emotions、attention to the advertisement、attitudes toward the advertisement and attitudes toward the brand. Therefore, we design 2 × 2 (music-message incongruity high / low × music indexicality high / low), which total four versions of TV advertisements, to conduct the research. Most of the samples are college students and graduate students, and we use LISREL to analyze the model. Consequently, we find that music-message incongruity doesn’t necessarily arouse the consumers’ feeling of humor. Also, music-message incongruity decrease positive emotions, and it also has direct negative effect on attitudes toward the advertisement. On the other hand, when the indexicality of the music is high, the consumers pay more attention to the advertisement and have positive emotions in their mind. Moreover, humor is helpful to increase attention to the advertisement and arouse the consumers’ positive emotions. If attention to the advertisement is high, positive emotions would also be strong. Positive emotions can also bring positive attitudes toward the advertisement. Finally, we prove that the more positive attitudes toward the advertisement would result in more positive attitudes toward the brand.