TV that makes dinosaurs come alive?!

This advert, designed by Panasonic to promote their 3D TV products, is a good example of the ‘extreme consequences’ template described by Goldenberg, Mazursky and Solomon (1999).  This basic idea of this template is to present an extreme consequence of owning the product in a humorous way.  Even though the audience will know that such a consequence is impossible and absurd it will still lead to them holding a positive view of the product because the extreme consequence is seen as an indicator of the actual high quality of the product.

For an ‘extreme consequences’ template advert to be effective it must present a realistic set of situations and a realistic set of consequences which are then joined by an extreme linking operator.  If employed correctly use of the template will lead to the audience forming positive linking between the product and the message.  This can be seen in figure 1 below, taken from Goldenberg et al.’s (1999) original paper.

Figure 1. general model of the 'extreme situation' template.

Applied to the advert above, the ‘extreme situation’ template is being used to link a realistic situation of the product (watching TV at home in your living) and a realistic consequence of the product (watching very realistic images produced by the 3D TV) to suggest that the 3D effects of the Panasonic TV are so realistic that images on the TV will actually come alive in your living room!

The hope is that even though the audience will know that buying the Panasonic TV will never lead to dinosaurs reappearing from the dead in their living room, they will interpret this extreme link to mean that the 3D effect provided by the TV are uber realistic and of very high quality, hence they will be more likely to purchase the product.

Goldberg, J., Mazursky, D., & Solomon, S. (1999). The fundamental templates of quality ads. Marketing Science, 18, 333-351.