A Text Mining Study of Consumer Post-Exposure Narratives to a Racially-Themed Controversial Campaign: A Narrative Transportation Perspective

Abstract

Controversial advertising is a popular advertising creative strategy and technique that can grab consumer attention, generate emotional responses, and cause attitude changes. Storytelling advertising campaigns with a strong racial equality theme can easily spark controversies in today's Woke culture, as a type of social justice movements for Black minorities. This study employs a one-shot pre-experimental design to collect consumers‟ narratives after watching a professionally-produced controversial racially-themed campaign by Pepsi. We rely on past research in narrative transportation and controversial advertising as our interpretive lens to analyze text mining results. A total of 61 participants were conveniently recruited to participate in this study. This study found that audience's gender, generation, and race/ethnicity can predict variations in terms of their negative/positive sentiments toward and perceptions about a racially-themed controversial ad. Discussions and implications are provided.

Keywords

Controversial advertising / narrative transportation / post-exposure narratives / storytelling advertising / text mining / topic modeling / Word Cloud

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