PLEASANT SCENTS AND PERSUASION - AN INFORMATION-PROCESSING APPROACH

Participants observed a perfume advertisement in which either a physically attractive or relatively unattractive spokesperson promoted a new perfume using relatively strong or relatively weak arguments. Additionally, before observing the ad, some participants sampled the perfume. As expected, those participants who sampled the perfume were influenced more by the spokeswoman's attractiveness than by the strength of the arguments and participants not exposed to the perfume were more influenced by the strength of the arguments than by the spokesperson's attractiveness. An analysis of cognitive responses further suggested that participants not exposed to the perfume may have been systematically processing the advertisement and participants exposed to the perfume may have been more heuristically processing the message.