KOREASCHOLAR

In many mature markets competition keeps growing. As a result, products are increasingly becoming similar, which often prompts price reductions and other promotional tools to ensure profit margins and the long-term marketing viability. Another solution frequently employed to win the competition is the use of emotional advertising (Rossiter & Percy, 1997). This is because products sharing the same or similar attributes can generate different emotion, therefore, be perceived different. However, the frequent use of emotional advertising has led to the situation that not only products but also their ads become similar primarily because consumers buying products of the same category tend to prefer similar effects. Such similarity of the ads is likely to create confusion among the ads so that consumers may not identify the brands of the ads correctly. Impacts of the confusion, however, may differ due to a number of variables. Of the variables, a few critical variables are examined in this study, and several propositions are suggested for the future study.

• Cunhyeong Ci(Kookmin University, Republic of Korea)