AN INTEGRATIVE VIEW OF PERSUASIVE COMMUNICATION: THE EFFECTS OF TRAILERS AND ELECTRONIC WORD-OF-MOUTH ON MESSAGE PROCESSING AND RESPONSE IN THE CONTEXT OF MOTION PICTURES

Abstract

As a traditional technique of film promotion, movie trailers are an important source of information for individuals to make viewing decisions. Yet this does not necessarily imply that people base their decisions solely on them (Finsterwalder, Kuppelwieser, & de Villiers, 2012). Past research has identified a series of possible information sources frequently utilized by individuals to select movies, and electronic word-of-mouth is among the most popular ones and is gaining increasing research attention. The current research suggests an integrative perspective to examine the persuasion effects of these two sources of marketing-related messages on respectively different communication platforms (i.e. YouTube and Twitter) in the context of motion picture industry and to compare the influence of different word-of-mouth valence (i.e. positive vs. negative) within one experimental design. Adopting and coalescing the expectancy-value theory and the theory of reasoned action, the current research contributes to existing literature on media effects and consumer psychology by refining the existing integrative theoretical framework of individuals’ processing of and response to combined information in movie selection.