Emotions as predictor for consumer engagement in YouTube advertisement

Purpose YouTube has emerged as the most innovative social networking sites (SNS) with exclusive features at that time which allowed users to post, view, comment and link to videos on the site. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the way emotional appeals are being used in YouTube advertisements to promote their products by considering various big brands of different industries in emerging market like India. The advertisement that induces consumer’s emotions can cause subconscious reactions which supersede consumer’s logical and pragmatic responses to create the unbreakable bond with a brand. Design/methodology/approach The study has taken online video advertisements which were uploaded on YouTube by different companies. The advertisements considered for the study were selected on three criteria: having more than 1,00,000 subscribers; videos having Indian advertisements; and have released at least one popular advertisement of minimum 1,00,000 views monthly in the period January 1-December 31, 2016. Random sampling method was used. Content analysis of 150 video advertisements was done to assess the influence of positive and negative emotions on consumer engagement. Multiple regression method is used taking the stepwise method. Findings The present study focused on emotional aspects of the advertisement that induce consumer engagement through SNS. The marketing strategies mainly focus on rational aspects as well as emotional aspects. The study suggests that in emerging economy like India, people heavily rely on emotions rather than logical information regarding any goods or services; hence, we considered both positive and negative emotional aspects in the study so as to measure the influence of emotional appeals on consumer engagement. Positive emotional appeals like contentment, happiness and love have the positive influence on the consumer engagement. On the other hand, negative emotional appeals are negatively related to the consumer engagement. Originality/value The present study aims at measuring ripple effect of the emotional appeals on ads and also tries to compare the impact between positive and negative emotional appeals so that it becomes easy for the marketers to determine the context in which it can be applied. For this purpose, YouTube video ads from India have been taken as the object of study from different industries.