Exploring the Persuasive Effects of a Commercial for a Pharamaceutical Product : The Elderly vs. Young Adults

This paper explores the persuasive effects of different commercials for an analgesic on members of different age groups. Commercial content was manipulated to be either of (a) factual or (b) evaluative. The impact of these two contents was assessed on members of two different age groups: young adults (i.e. people between 20 and 40 years old) and the elderly (i.e. people over 55 years old). Results show that unaided recall is lower amongst the elderly whereas commercials with largely evaluative content result in higher miscomprehension amongst them. As compared to young adults, seniors developed more positive attitudes towards the commercials and generated more positive affective responses towards the product regardless of the commercial content, though their overall attitudes tend to be consistently neutral. Involvement towards the product plays an important mediating role, to such an extent that it blurs the effect of age group on attitude towards the product.