Let’s Dance a Little Bit: The Effect of Dance Scenes in Commercials on Brand Attitude

We present insights into the influence of dance in commercials on brand attitudes. We start with a strategic marketing perspective and provide an overview of purposes that dance scenes in promotional videos can have. Next, we present considerations on how to implement dance scenes to achieve these goals. We present results of an exploratory cross-sectional study and an experiment and show that dance has a positive but weak effect on brand attitudes. As a reason for this finding, we show that dance-averse people react unfavorably to dance in commercials. We provide recommendations on how to improve the effectiveness of dance scenes in ad videos.