Warm Brands: Impact of Empathetic Advertising on Positive Mood Regulation and Brand Relationship Quality

Abstract

This study aims to leverage consumers' positive moods to optimize the effectiveness of advertising campaigns. It seeks to determine how empathy can be used in advertising as a tool for emotional regulation, helping to establish a deeper and more lasting connection with consumers. An online experiment was conducted for the empirical study of the issue. The hypotheses were tested using structural modeling (via AMOS software) on a sample of 240 participants, and the sampling method adopted was convenience sampling. The results show that the perception of advertising that is congruent with the consumer's positive mood as empathetic stimulates the anthropomorphism of the advertised brand. Furthermore, this anthropomorphism of the advertised brand improves the quality of the consumer's relationship with that brand. However, the positive mood induced in consumers does not seem to stimulate their need for social affiliation or their perception of advertising that is congruent with their mood as empathetic, and the need for social affiliation, in turn, does not tend to stimulate brand anthropomorphism. This research is part of the current trend toward humanizing the customer-brand relationship through AI and paves the way for hyper-personalized and emotionally intelligent advertising. By measuring parameters such as facial expressions, heart rate variations, and vocal tones, integrated technologies (smartphone cameras, connected watches, etc.) make it possible to tailor advertising content to match the user's positive mood. This research goes beyond traditional segmentation criteria (age, gender, marital status) to rely on precise emotional data, enabling highly personalized advertising campaigns. This research reverses the dominant perspective in the literature on empathy in advertising. It shifts the focus away from consumers' empathetic responses to advertising and treats advertising itself as a non-interpersonal empathetic agent, capable of projecting itself onto the consumer to share and maintain their pleasant emotional state. This tends to influence the quality of the consumer-brand relationship.