Provocation and Millennials : Explorative study on millennials ́ emotional response

Abstract: Introduction​: Market has saturated in the point where customers are facing advertising overload. For companies it can be difficult task to achieve attention among desired target audience. Millennials have become one of the most valuable target group that companies are aiming to target. One way to achieve attention is to do provocative advertising that aims to shock, or violate millennials norms, principles or social cause. Millennials is a special demographic group, compared to previous ones, baby boomers and generation X, since they are more resistant towards provocation. Thys, thesis stress the importance of exploring millennials emotional response when they are exposed to provocation. Purpose: ​The purpose of this paper is to explore Millennials ́ emotional response when exposed to provocative advertising. Research Questions: ‘​Which negative emotions provoke millennials?’ and ‘Which positive emotions provoke millennials?’ Theoretical Framework: ​Theory foundation is builded on provocative advertising and emotional response. Provocative advertising is divided into shock, and social cause. Emotional response concentrates on positive and negative emotions. Method: ​The authors of this paper used qualitative approach, deductive structure with explorative purpose that is aiming for in-depth information. Total amount of 8 semi-structured interviews were recorded. Information from interviews were further comprehended via coding schedule. Empirical Investigation: ​Empirical chapter presents the main patterns of information from interviews. Chapter is divided into negative and positive parts. This chapters are following the coding schedule structure where main chapters are divided into subchapters based on the sub-categories of coding schedule. Analysis: ​The analysis of the empirical investigation showed important information regarding millennials emotional response. Analysis presented that negative emotional response of fear, anger, sadness and disgust are evoked when millennials are exposed to provocative advertising. While emotional response of positive emotions, millennials expressed emotional response of contentment to provocative advertising. Thus, no emotional response of love, pride, or happiness was found. Conclusion: ​Conclusion of the thesis presented the important findings that millennials are more likely expressing negative than positive emotional response when they are exposed to provocative advertising. Thus emotional response of fear, anger, sadness, disgust or/and contentment were Millennials emotional response to provocative advertising.