Future Developments in IMC : Why E-Mail with Video Trumps Text-Only E-Mail for Brands

The objective is to examine affective and attitudinal consumer responses to audiovisual (i.e., short videos) verses text-only messages in brand communication. Via experimental findings with an adult sample and two brands (Apple and Audi), we find that integrating audiovisual content in email to consumers will result in a higher state of arousal, attitudinal state (toward the ad and brand), purchase intention, and eWom than from text-only email. These findings hold for both brands. The theoretical implication supports a superiority effect of audiovisual stimuli in digital brand communication (specifically business to consumer email), a digital context that is quite important yet relatively understudied by scholars