Harnessing the power of joy: Exploring the role of discrete positive emotions in driving consumer behaviour and advertising engagement

While existing advertising emotion research heavily emphasises negative emotions, positive emotions, like joy, remain less understood. This study examines the role of joy in shaping behavioural responses to advertising. We propose a framework to analyse the discrete emotion of joy and its relationship with consumer engagement. Using a sample of 3,407 Facebook advertisements from eight advertisers, we employed a text-analytic approach leveraging the NRC (National Research Council) Emotion Lexicon and natural language processing to measure sentiment and discrete emotions. Mediation analysis revealed that joy-related word associations fully mediated the effect of sentiment on advertising link clicks but did not mediate shares or comments. These findings suggest that linguistic markers of joy can effectively convey positive emotional framing in advertising, supporting short-term marketing objectives. This article is also included in The Business & Management Collection which can be accessed at http://hstalks/business.