The power of online advertising

: how hedonic and utilitarian appeals on e-mail : newsletters can impact consumer choices

Abstract

Digital marketing has revolutionized the advertising industry. One of the areas it has had a meaningful impact is on the online shopping experiences, called e-commerce. To engage and retain customers to an online shop, one of the most popular and beneficial advertising tools is the e-newsletter. To better understand how to optimize such a tool, this dissertation focuses on one of the main differentiations between products (hedonic vs. utilitarian), The purpose is to understand how can they best appeal to customers so that the exposure to the ad results in the choice of said product(s). To test how this categorization of products have impact on its advertising, testing was done by sending different newsletters displaying different combinations of hedonic and utilitarian products. Results show that newsletters portraying hedonic goods are more successful and advertising more than one product in the same newsletter benefits both hedonic and utilitarian products in engaging customers’ awareness. For the future of advertising, and in specific of online advertising, this research can help prove how the impact of such a small change in the ad can influence the whole customer decision-process. Moreover, the results highlight the need for retailers to define a very specific and detail-oriented advertising and communications strategy.

Date of Award	2 Nov 2015
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Fernando Luís Jorge (Supervisor) & Ana Isabel de Almeida Costa (Co-Supervisor)