• Archives of design research
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• v.18 no.3 s.61
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• pp.129-138
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• 2005

It has been assumed that the clarification of a message is a necessary element for successful communication. However, in the today's complicated and changing environment of business marketing media, it is shown that the clarification of the message of advertisement may inhibit the effectiveness of communication. This study was to examine what was effective communication in advertisement when the company, provoking the people's negative emotional response, needs to establish new identities such as the goals and the special fields of business. In particular, the study was to investigate what effect the advertising strategy of strategically emitting ambiguous messages makes on the consumer's recognition, emotional attitude, reliability, and attitude towards the company. It was hypothesized that an ambiguous message in an advertisement has an effect on the consumer's recognition, emotional attitude, reliability, and attitude towards the company. Three texts from the 'Imagination Praises' campaign of KT&G which has been in process since 2003 were systematically sampled and the survey was performed by the means of questionnaires made on the sample The results showed that the ambiguous message of advertising texts gained better responses on the consumer's attention, good impression, affirmation, memory, sympathy than the dear message and that the ambiguous message had an effect on the consumer's attitude towards the advertisement itself. Thus, it could be tentatively concluded that the ambiguous message could be more effective in recognition and recall to promote the changes of identities of the company having the people's unfavorable emotion. But there wasn't any evidence that an ambiguous message in an advertisement was more effective in terms of the consumer's emotional response, reliability, and attitude towards the company. From this, it could be inferred that the receiver had an uncomfortable, doubtful and negative attitude about the implicit expressive code contained in the message. In the future deeper qualitative studies can compensate for the limited explanation of this empirical study focused on statistical analyses.