DOES THE NEED FOR COGNITION, NEED FOR AFFECT AND PERCEIVED HUMOUR INFLUENCE CONSUMERS’ ATTITUDES TOWARDS THE ADVERTISED BRANDS?

Cognition has long been known as a mechanism to process message besides forming desirable attitude. However, the engagement of emotions that has been limited in its discussions to the message processing theory such as the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) could also function as influencer to message processing and contributor to attitude formation. Hence, the purpose of this research is to examine the effects of need for cognition (NFC), need for affect (NFA) and perceived humour on consumers’ attitude towards the brands advertised. The research engaged three main studies and has adopted a quantitative basic experimental design with a random selection and distribution of participants into treatment groups. Result of study 1 showed that advertising attitude mediates between NFC and brand attitude. Study 2 found that NFA moderates between NFC and brand attitude. Study 3 revealed that NFA moderates between perceived humour and brand attitude. Finally, the results also determined that NFC, NFA, and perceived humour influence the processing of advertising message in the low and high involvement conditions of message elaborations. The findings encourage future researchers to further assess consumers’ attitude towards brand in various advertising contexts in more detail. The study contributes to the advertising guidelines for advertising firms and policy makers. In addition, the study contributes to the theoretical establishment of the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) that can be used for future research extension.    Keywords: Brand attitude, involvement, need for cognition, need for affect, perceived humour.