Affective Tourism Marketing: How and Why Place Marketing Companies Attempt to Elicit Hedonic Emotions Using Audio-Visual Stimuli

This thesis reports on research into the measurement of emotion in advertising. Its hypothesis is "the presence of three precognitive stimuli - voice, music and face - in adverts will cause a corresponding emotional effect in viewers‟. This thesis attempts to find a replicable and reliable way of counting the presence of these three stimuli posing a new model of testing adverts for emotional content and responses. The model proposes that adverts are tested from an encoding and decoding perspective and suggests a four-stage process of interview, content analysis, biofeedback test (using electromyography (EMG), heart-rate and skin conductance) and self-report test (using Feeltrace). This model is explained in this thesis then tested using an example of place adverts. Interviewers of some of the encoders of place adverts indicated that eliciting hedonic emotions were one of their aims which was tested by a content analysis which confirmed the presence of voice, music and faces which expressed hedonic emotion. 20 subjects volunteered from the University of Leicester to undergo the biofeedback and self-report experiments, watching 20 adverts for places. The results showed that the stimuli had a hedonic effect on the biological and cognitive aspects of emotion but there was no significant correlation between the level of hedonic stimuli in the adverts and the responses.