Resolving Humorous Incongruity in Advertising Facilitates Impressions of Firm Competence

Humor is a common executional tactic in advertising (Eisend 2009). Given that humor affects impression formation in interindividual settings (Greengross, Martin, and Miller 2012), we propose that humor influences the impressions that consumers form of a company that uses humor in advertising. Although both warmth and competence impressions can result from observing humor, we focus on the competence impressions, which take priority in consumers’ choice of products and service providers (Kirmani, Hamilton, Thompson, and Lantzy 2017). The first goal of this research is, therefore, to identify a humor execution that particularly enhances competence impressions of advertisers. The second goal is to explain why this effect occurs. Research has identified three humor processes that can elicit laughter, namely incongruity-resolution, tension-relief, and humorous disparagement (Speck 1991). Incongruity-resolution represents a humor process in which perceivers first experience something surprising, peculiar, or unusual and later are able to resolve it. This process is characteristic of humor forms such as puns, punchlines, or comic irony. Since the resolution of incongruity requires cognitive skills (Martin 2010), we predict that incongruous humor, if successfully resolved, triggers competence impressions of advertisers. Tension-relief, on the other hand, mainly induces laughter as a way to release nervous energy. This humor process leads perceivers to experience empathetic emotions, which can be transferred to improve any subsequently evaluations of advertisers, but not specifically competence evaluations. Lastly, humorous disparagement mostly harms, rather than improves competence impressions, since it may indicate the deprecators’ unjust ridicule and ignorance of social boundaries (i.e. other-disparagement) or draws attention to the deprecators’ real weaknesses (i.e. self-disparagement) (Greengross and Miller 2008).