What’s in an accent? Assessing the effectiveness of a regional variety in radio advertising.
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2018-07-12
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en
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More and more advertisers use regional accents in their commercials. A main reason for utilizing these accents is the activation of region-of-origin associations. Ideally, these associations transfer to the product advertised, which has a positive influence on attitude and purchase intention of the recipients. Standard language mostly is considered as more prestigious, whereas non-standard language can be considered appealing to personal integrity values (i.e. feelings of warmth and belonginess). Additionally, advertisers can also incorporate emotional appeals in their advertisements, which can elicit feelings of prestige and warmth and increase the persuasiveness of an ad. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of the regional accent Brabant on the persuasiveness of commercials, influenced by emotional appeal. In a two (accents: standard Randstad Dutch vs. non-standard Brabant) by two (appeal: prestige vs. personal integrity) design, 156 participants evaluated four different commercials on attitude towards product, attitude towards advertisement, behavioral attitude and behavioral intention. Inconsistent with the literature and hypotheses, no effects were found for either congruence (combination of variety and appeal) and language variety, which means that both language varieties scored equally high on attitude towards product, attitude towards advertisement, behavioral attitude and behavioral intention. Furthermore, the standard variety outperformed the non-standard variety on the brand recall task. The only influence was that of emotional appeal; advertisements appealing to personal integrity values, were rated more positively, which lead to higher purchase intention.
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