The Smile Appeal: Emotional Contagion from Smiling Models Affects Consumer Attitudes for Advertisements and Product Packaging Positively

Smiling faces appear frequently in marketing communications, but so far they have received scant attention from marketing researchers. This study assesses the effects of including pictures of smiling faces in visual marketing in terms of emotional contagion and attitudes for the marketing stimuli. Two experiments were conducted, one with advertisement stimuli and one with product packaging stimuli. one main finding is that images with smiling human models produced more positive attitudes toward the marketing stimuli than images with non-smiling models. Mediation analysis also indicated that emotional contagion mediated the effects on attitudes.