Message framing, non-conscious perception and effectiveness in non-profit advertising. Contribution by neuromarketing research

Advertising for non-profit organizations through television commercials is a valuable means of communication to raise awareness and receive donations. When it comes to social aspects, personal attitudes such as empathy are significant for reinforcing the intention to donate; and the study of eliciting emotions has critical attention in the literature, especially some types of emotion, such as guilt which mediates empathy. Different methodologies have been used to measure consumer emotions when faced with TV ads stimuli: mainly traditional techniques such as interviews or questionnaires after the ads viewing. In the last ten years, there has also been a great interest in new neuroscience techniques applied to measure emotional and cognitive reactions by physiological signals, frame by frame. Our research has applied neuromarketing technologies during the observation of a UNHCR commercial promoting legacy calls. The objective was to study cognitive and emotional reactions in order to increase the effectiveness whilst having the possibility to verify the results by measuring the benefits in terms of calls from contributors. The purpose of this research is to empirically prove the impact in calls thanks to changes in the message framing strategy in non-profit advertising suggested and measured by neuromarketing techniques. Particularly we measured the cerebral activity through an electroencephalogram to obtain an Approach-Withdrawal Index (AW); the heart rate and galvanic skin response through different sensors in the palm of one hand, to obtain an Emotional Index (EI), and finally, eye fixations through an eye tracker device to obtain the visual attention on key visual areas of the ads. After these indicators’ recordings on a sample of subjects, some suggestions to modify the advertising were made to create a more effective campaign. The results compared, those elicited by the first version of the spot (LVE) and those by the second version (HVE), confirmed that (1) the number of sellable and legacy calls increased with the message framing strategy modified in the second spot (HVE), (2) a lower cognitive and emotional reactions have been obtained in the final section of HVE, (3) the visual attention on the key information of the phone number to call, in the final call to action frames(CTA), was higher in HVE than in the first version of the spot (LVE), (4) the cognitive approach increased during the same CTA frames in HVE.