Heart or brain? An Experimental Study on the Effect of Rational and Emotional Communication on Purchase Intention for Running Shoes

Sammanfattning

This study examines the extent to which rational communication influences consumer purchase intention for running shoes compared to emotional communication, and whether gender and need for cognition (NFC) moderate this relationship. Drawing on the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) as its theoretical framework, the study employed a between-subjects experimental design with a randomized online survey distributed to active runners via a Swedish Facebook group (n = 323). Participants were randomly assigned to either a rational or emotional infographic advertisement for a fictitious running shoe brand. Purchase intention was operationalized using five items adapted from Dodds et al. (1991), and NFC was measured with a six-item scale from Coelho et al. (2020). Results from independent samples t-tests, two-way ANOVA, and ANCOVA showed no statistically significant main effect of communication style on purchase intention (t = 1.46, p = .145, d = 0.163), and gender did not moderate this relationship. NFC showed no significant overall moderating effect, though an exploratory subgroup analysis indicated that respondents with low NFC, particularly women, responded more strongly to rational communication (p = .035, d = 0.44). The findings suggest that neither communication style alone is sufficient for a product that activates consumers on both functional and lifestyle dimensions simultaneously, and that NFC may be a more relevant segmentation variable than gender in this context.