The ethics of emotion-arousing & psychoactive ads and their influence on individuals - Essay Example

they depend upon the fact that prospective customers would be interested in obtaining more information about the product and services so that they can arrive at the logically best choice. On the other hand, an emotional appeal is used to create an ambience, to invoke a general feeling - of goodwill or of fear or urgency or any other diverse emotions. It is expected that the aroused feelings would incite and encourage the prospective customer to buy the products associated with such ads. While the appeal of both the approaches has been established by several studies, some professional critics believe advertising adversely affects people and manipulates us to buy things/services by playing on our emotions.

Advertising is so powerful that consumers are helpless to defend themselves against it. This has been a time long debate involving issues like not only the morality of using emotions to manipulate consumers, but also about the efficacy and potency of such ads to actually influence the purchase decision. Emotional advertising readily gains public attention when it evokes our fears and wants, sometimes at a very deep level. Some critics claim that these powerful messages are often ineffective, because consumers often tend to remember the emotions but not the product (O’Neill, 2006).

The subject under consideration is vast, as scores of early researchers have tried to find evidence for the harmful effects that advertising, and especially emotional advertising has had on people o different ages. Further, an equal number of organizations and businesses have supported research extolling the powerful impacts of emotional advertising and thus providing them with the rationale of spending millions of pounds into emotional advertising. The current research will therefore narrow with scope to a more specific topic – and try to evaluate the relative effectiveness of two different kinds of emotional appeals, namely of using warmth and of using fear in ads. The