Abstract
In an increasingly competitive advertising context, the race for originality among advertisers have positioned humor as a determinant tool. Indeed, as the media offer is growing (television, radio, e-advertising, billboards, street marketing, etc). There is a proliferation of humorous and offbeat advertising campaigns. Preventive communications, which generally use persuasive techniques for advertising, are turning more and more to humor. Indeed, humor have been proved to be efficient in terms of persuasion and could thus present some advantages in preventive communications. It could notably 1) offer new opportunities to catch the public attention with a new effect, different from the ones used by traditional preventive communications (fear, shame or guilt appeal) and 2) avoid disinterest of people to preventive communication involving negative emotions. Consequently, this research aims to better understand the use of humor in preventive communication and to identify the conditions to ensure its effectiveness. This thesis pursues a first theoretical objective: to shed light on the concept of humor and its implementation in communication. An experimental study on 300 people, in the context of the overweight and obesity prevention, was conducted to test several preventive communications using different types of humor. The objectives are the following: 1) to ensure the effectiveness of a persuasive preventive communication about overweight and obesity using humor, 2) examining the effects of different types of humor on this effectiveness and 3) to study the process of influence (cognitive and affective) and the conditions of efficiency of humor by identifying mediating and moderating variables (in particular the role of individual variables such as self-esteem, perceived body and body satisfaction).