Emotional Resonance in Marketing: Analysing the Effectiveness of Emotional Appeals in Advertising among Generation Z

Abstract

The research explores the role of eleven emotional appeals—musical, empathy, youth, popularity, endorsement, adventure, fear, humour, romantic, personal, and social—on Generation Z, a generation recognized for their overtly digital lifestyle and diverse interests. Using a one-way repeated measures ANOVA, the results show that there are significant differences between the appeal effects. Appeals to music, empathy and youth have the greatest effect on this group whereas appeals to humour, romance and the personal direct connection play no meaningful role. There are also gender effects, as males prefer humour and fear appeals while females prefer empathy and music appeals. Furthermore, age and education also moderate the effectiveness of the endorsements and the romantic themes, with more positive responses from the older and more educated segment of the survey.