The Effects of Syntactic Complexity on Advertising Persuasiveness

Abstract

Three experiments investigated the effects of syntactic complexity on the persuasiveness of advertising. Experiment 1 showed that, in a broadcast advertising context, syntactic complexity affects recall and recognition but not the persuasiveness of the advertising. However, Experiment 2 indicated that, in a print context, persuasiveness of an advertisement is affected by syntactic complexity. Finally, Experiment 3 demonstrated that motivation to process information interacts with syntactic complexity to determine the persuasiveness of print advertising. These results imply that the impact of syntactic complexity on advertising effectiveness is more complicated than previously thought.