The influence of semantic primitives in an emotion-mediated willingness to buy model from advertising speech

Abstract

The retail industries strive to enhance the willingness to buy through various elements, such as store environment, layout, and advertising. Speech is one of the most effective methods used in advertising, particularly in broadcast advertising. Our previous study indicated that the stimulus-organism-response (SOR) theory, using emotional states, can partially explain the effect of advertising speech on the willingness to buy. It suggests that emotional states alone are not sufficient to explain this effect. In this study, we conducted an experiment to determine whether adding semantic primitives to the emotion-mediated SOR model could completely mediate the impact of advertising speech on the willingness to buy. During the study, participants listened to speech with modified features (mean fundamental frequency (F0), speech rate, or standard deviation of F0) and rated their willingness to buy the advertised products, as well as their own emotions and semantic primitives. We found that adding semantic primitives as a mediator can completely mediate the willingness to buy from the standard deviation of F0 in the advertising speech. These results will be useful for developing speech synthesis methods aimed at increasing people’s willingness to buy.