Relevancy and expectancy: Incongruency's effect on high- and low-involvement consumers' processing of ad information

Abstract

Drawing from research in involvement, message incongruency, schema theory and associative memory models, hypotheses were developed predicting that message incongruency will have differential effects on information processing within levels of high (HI) and low (LI) involvement subjects. It is argued that various characteristics of an executional cue may not affect HI and LI consumers in traditional ways prescribed by peripheral- versus central-route processes. Rather, the presence of incongruencies between the visual and verbal elements within a print ad may have a greater attractive force and motivate more thorough elaboration of pictorial and copy information than congruent elements. Although support for hypotheses was limited, cell means were remarkably consistent in the predicted directions and proportions, especially for recall of copy information and recall of the primary picture object. These patterns provide some support that the two dimensions of incongruency, relevancy and expectancy, do play a role in information processing for both high-and low-involvement consumers.