Marketing Research Seminar - Zitian Adam, HEC Lausanne

Common practices and existing research recommend using human speech (e.g., vocal narration) in advertising videos to enhance product desirability. But does this strategy hold for luxury brands? This research applies machine-learning techniques to analyze 4,720 advertising videos from 27 luxury car brands and 96,037 related consumer comments. The results reveal that merely incorporating human speech in luxury brand advertising videos significantly reduces consumer desire for the featured products. This negative effect is explained by a reduction in awe—an intense emotion commonly elicited by experiences of admiration. A follow-up laboratory experiment supports these findings. This work contributes to luxury marketing research by highlighting the essential role of awe in driving the success of luxury advertising practices. Methodologically, it offers a comprehensive framework guiding the computational analysis of advertising videos and consumers’ responses. Furthermore, it introduces a pre-trained machine-learning model that detects expressions of awe in consumer comments that outperforms existing dictionary-based approaches, paving the way for future research on this emotion.