Harnessing the power of joy: Exploring the role of discrete positive emotions in driving consumer behaviour and advertising engagement
Abstract
While existing advertising emotion research heavily emphasises negative emotions, positive emotions, like joy, remain less understood. This study examines the role of joy in shaping behavioural responses to advertising. We propose a framework to analyse the discrete emotion of joy and its relationship with consumer engagement. Using a sample of 3,407 Facebook advertisements from eight advertisers, we employed a text-analytic approach leveraging the NRC (National Research Council) Emotion Lexicon and natural language processing to measure sentiment and discrete emotions. Mediation analysis revealed that joy-related word associations fully mediated the effect of sentiment on advertising link clicks but did not mediate shares or comments. These findings suggest that linguistic markers of joy can effectively convey positive emotional framing in advertising, supporting short-term marketing objectives. This article is also included in The Business & Management Collection which can be accessed at http://hstalks/business.
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Author's Biography
Kristen L. Sussman is an advertising scholar and computational social scientist specialising in social media, digital advertising and artificial intelligence (AI) mediated communication. Her recent work investigates the impact of discrete emotions, such as joy, on advertising outcomes and examines the ethical and strategic implications of generative AI in persuasive messaging. She currently teaches advertising strategy and social media campaigns at Texas State University. Before academia, Dr Sussman founded and led Social Distillery, an award-winning agency that helped scale social business strategies for clients such as Facebook (now Meta), Dairy Queen and Farm Credit Bank of Texas. Dr Sussman also serves as Co-Principal Investigator on a City of Austin grant, exploring the role of AI in public communication, contributing expertise in behavioural trace data and message design. Her research has been published in the Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, International Journal of Advertising, Journal of Interactive Advertising, among others. She is an active member of the American Academy of Advertising and the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.
Laura F. Bright is an associate professor of media analytics in the Stan Richards School of Advertising and Public Relations in the Moody College of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin. Laura’s research focuses on social media addiction and fatigue, Big Data and personalised advertising, and consumer engagement online. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Current Issues in Research and Advertising, Journal of Interactive Advertising, Computers in Human Behavior, Journal of Marketing Communication, Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice and Internet Research, among others. In the classroom, Laura delivers content in the areas of media management, digital media effects, and advertising research methods. She has been Associate Editor for the Journal of Interactive Advertising and currently serves on the editorial review boards for the Journal of Advertising, Journal of Current Issues in Research and Advertising, International Journal of Advertising and the Journal of Social Media in Society. She has spent over a decade working in the interactive advertising business in Austin, Texas, and currently consults various companies and organisations on optimising their digital presence.
Gary B. Wilcox is the John A. Beck Centennial Professor in Communication in the Stan Richards School of Advertising & Public Relations. He is also an associated faculty in the Department of Statistics & Data Sciences and the Center for Health Communication at UT Austin. Dr Wilcox holds a PhD from Michigan State University and two degrees from UT Austin. His recent research interests include unstructured data analysis, social media analytic models and advertising’s effects on alcohol products and brands.
