This robust structural modeling study, with over 23,000 responses to 240 advertising messages, found that affect when measured by a visual measure of emotional response dominates over cognition for predicting conative attitude and action.
AFFECTIVE AND COGNITIVE-BASED ATTITUDEFor many years, there was a tendency of focusing on cognitive-based attitude, suggesting that, with advertising involvement, cognition predominates over affective processing and that affective reactions are always mediated by cognition (Greenwald and Leavitt, 1984; Tsal, 1985). In fact, the derivation and strength of the attitude toward the ad (Aad) process is based on the relationship between attitude toward the ad and attitude toward the brand (Abd), and the determination that Abd predicts purchase intention (Mitchell and Olson, 1981;Lutz, MacKenzie, and Belch, 1983;MacKenzie and Lutz, 1986). Fishbein (Fishbein and Middlestadt, 1995) also heralded the notion of cognitive-based attitude by suggesting that a consumer's attitude is a function of (cognitive) beliefs and those beliefs predict intentions of behavior.Studies examining the role and relationship of emotion as the mediator of responses to advertising (Edell and Burke, 1987; Holbrook and Batra, 1987), however, have found that cognition can drive affect. In fact, some researchers (Brown and Stayman, 1992; Cohen and Areni, 1991; Petty et al., 1991) have argued that affect can directly influence attitude and that cognitive-based models fail to properly measure feelings associated with the sources of information (Edell and Burke, 1987; Schwarz, 1997). Failing to understand the role of
