Humour in food advertising

Abstract

Humour is known to help relational outcomes. In business, business sectors (product-based vs service-based) and humour styles (constructive vs offensive) play a defining role. This study aims to identify how humour impacts the selling of food products. This study is based on studies about humour effects in business, management, marketing, and psychology. Food advertisements are analysed in an attempt to identify the ways in which humour determines consumers to buy one food product or another. Constructive humour has positive effects on business performance and work relationship quality no matter the business sector. The only limitation of the research concerns the cultural context (only Romanian advertisements are analysed). This study allows strategic insights into how to use humour in an advertising context. To the best of the author’s knowledge, no previous Romanian study has until now examined the impact of humour on the selling of food products due to advertisements.