Do Emotions Pay Off? Effects of Media Brand Emotions on Cognitive Relief, Identification and Prestige

While in early days of communication research emotions were rather treated as „noise‟, today there is a growing number of studies showing the important role of emotions influencing media selection, perception and interpretation. These developments run in parallel to branding theory, where emotional branding has emerged as a highly influential branding paradigm. The present study analyses the emotions recipients associate with different television stations, and it identifies their impact on audience-related functions of media brands as suggested by previous research, i.e., complexity and risk reduction, self-definition, and self-expression. An online study has been conducted for one media category, namely television stations in Austria (n = 495). As the results indicate, emotions affect cognitive relief and they support the perception of brands as means for self-definition and self-expression. Joy, trust, pride and boredom are the most influential emotional drivers for these functions. The findings not only suggest concrete implications for communication activities and media branding strategists, they also uncover „white spaces‟ on the communication research agenda, where emotions should get a deeper theoretical and methodological debate.