An Experimental Investigation of Cognitive Response to Advertising: A Physiological Perspective for Tourism Destination Marketing

Abstract

It is of considerable importance for tourism destination marketing organizations (DMOs) to understand the effects of various types of imagery-evoking stimuli on tourists’ visionary responses to advertising material. Accordingly, they face the need to evaluate the efficacy of advertising promotions. To date, however, there has been a paucity of research on the cognitive processes underlying the observed effects of ads featuring visuals and text versus audio mental imagery only within the context of the tourism field. This study explores how ads that include visuals and text compare with high imagery audio imagery in destination advertisements in affecting the allocation of processing resources to encode the message in memory. This study introduces a psychophysiology model—LC4MP—and a physiological measure (i.e., heart rate) that examines mental processing of tourism ads. The results indicate that high-imagery audio ads appear to lead people to invest more effort into committing the images to memory. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.