Incongruent Humour, Advertising Effectiveness and Women: An Experiment On Facebook

Abstract The objective of this paper is to analyze how ads with incongruous humor on Facebook influence female Brazilian consumer engagement, attitudes and purchase intention. An experiment conducted on Facebook with 269 women allowed us to test whether the presence of incongruous humor influences advertisement effectiveness, confirming this hypothesis, demonstrating that humorous appeal has a positive effect on female audiences. Regarding contributions, our findings confirm that engagement, attitudes and purchase intention conform to important measures of advertisement effectiveness in the virtual context; reveal new facets about women's perception of stimuli traditionally designed for men; and show social networks to be fundamental elements for consumer decision-making. Thus, we discuss the role of the Internet as a platform for interaction between companies and users and the need of building a relationship in this context, in which incongruous humor proves to be capable of catching consumer attention, arousing engagement, provoking favorable attitudes and, thereby, driving purchase intention.