**1. Introduction**

Over the past few years, rootedness in the territory has become a very important motivational driver for the purchase of agri-food products [1–4]. In order to protect the rights of both consumers and producers, the European Union (EC Regulations 2081/92 and 2082/92) has identified three different designations that certify the products with a strong territorial identity: the Protected Designations of Origin, the Protected Geographical Indications, and the Traditional Specialities Guaranteed [5]. Those certified products are often associated with appealing concepts such as quality [6], tradition [7], sustainability [8], safety [2] and cultural identification [9]. Nevertheless, they struggle to compete with their industrial competitors in terms of budget allocation for communication campaigns since they are often produced by small and rural entities [10].

The communication campaigns make extensive use of emotions since they mediate and moderate consumer decision-making processes [11]. The effectiveness of commercials in

**Citation:** Russo, V.; Bilucaglia, M.; Circi, R.; Bellati, M.; Valesi, R.; Laureanti, R.; Licitra, G.; Zito, M. The Role of the Emotional Sequence in the Communication of the Territorial Cheeses: A Neuromarketing Approach. *Foods* **2022**, *11*, 2349. https://doi.org/10.3390/ foods11152349

 Academic Editor: Maria Lisa Clodoveo

Received: 16 June 2022 Accepted: 3 August 2022 Published: 5 August 2022

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**Copyright:** © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

generating emotions has been shown to be a good sales predictor [12]. In fact, emotions have a strong impact on message perception [13], increasing the likelihood that the advertised product or brand will attract attention and be remembered [14–16].

In recent years, much research has focused on how the sequence of opposite emotions (negative emotions followed by positive emotions or positive emotions followed by negative emotions) can be effective in persuading consumers [17]. Some evidence suggests that negative emotions followed by positive emotions are more effective because people perceive emotions based on an initial reference point [18,19]. For example, charity advertising most often tends to elicit negative emotions from the description of a problematic situation and then generate positive emotions from the description of the possibility of making actions to help people in need [20,21]. Although the issues and psychological mechanisms underlying the charity advertising are very different from those of agri-food products, similar concepts can be, in principle, applied to both. Just as the act of giving can help solve a problematic situation, the consumption of agri-food products rooted in the local area can be presented as a possible solution to problems such as pollution, communication asymmetry between consumer and producer, and the low perception of safety associated with industrial products [22–25].

In the past, the effectiveness of the communication campaigns in eliciting specific emotions had been studied mainly by assessing consumers' conscious responses. However, the limitations of "classic" survey instruments used by marketers have been discussed in the literature for a long time now. Questionnaires [26,27], interviews [28,29] and focus groups [30] have been shown to be reliable only within certain limits, due to both the impossibility of obtaining detailed and/or truthful opinions from people [31] and the need to rely on subjective interpretations of interviewers that may not reflect the real internal dynamics of the consumer [30]. The lack of reliable methods for predicting consumer behaviour can have serious consequences: of the new products launched in the market, between 40% and 80% are doomed to fail, causing economic damage to companies quantifiable in the order of billions of dollars [32–34]. For these reasons, in recent years, there has been a growing interest in neuromarketing techniques [34,35].

We refer to neuromarketing as the use of neuroscience tools and insights to provide answers to challenges in business practices, especially in advertising and marketing research [36]. This discipline studies the latent mental processes underlying consumer behaviour [37,38]. The emergence of this strand of literature is due, on the one hand, to the need of marketers to identify methods that can better predict the success of marketing campaigns and, on the other hand, the need of neuroscientists to develop methods and techniques that can increase our knowledge of the brain [34,39–41]. Neuromarketing aims to overcome the limitations of traditional marketing methodologies by directly investigating emotional reactions using tools capable of detecting electrophysiological variables [40–43].

Neuromarketing applications are widespread. They include the evaluation of static advertising in both digital and printed format [44], radio and video commercials [45], as well as product packaging [46]. In addition to the profit-making sector, no-profit organisations operating in the charity [47] and social utility [48] have taken advantage of neuromarketing. Within the food and beverage sector, neuromarketing investigated the effectiveness of the food packages in communicating key factors such as the health content of the labels and the presence of additives [49], as well as the consumption sustainability [50] and the territoriality [1].

To the best of our knowledge, no study has ever assessed the effectiveness of certified agri-food product communication using neuromarketing techniques. In addition, no study has ever investigated the role of the emotional sequence in the communication of certified agri-food products.

This study fills these gaps in the literature, evaluating the emotional impact of two different video commercials created to promote certified cheeses from Southern Italy. Both the commercials focused on themes such as references to territory, production techniques and natural landscapes as key communication drivers. References to territoriality are often used because the specificity of the area of origin and the limited production area help endow the product with special characteristics in the eyes of the consumer [51]. Emphasis on production techniques was placed to emphasise sustainability in terms of respect for the environment and support for local people [22,23]. Finally, since certified products are also characterised in terms of eco-sustainability and environment preservation, references to nature are often present in their promotion [52].

Although the two videos focused on the same themes, they differed in terms of emotional sequence. The first, named "Rewind", was designed to elicit mostly positive emotions, focusing mainly on aspects related to the goodness of the product and production techniques. The second, named "The Myth", was designed to elicit an emotional sequence from initial negativity to positivity in the end: the theme of the territoriality is proposed as a solution to the problems represented by the loss of contact of humans with territories and traditions. A detailed description of the videos can be found in Appendix A.

As common practice in neuromarketing studies [53], we collected three electrophysiological signals: the electroencephalogram (EEG), the skin conductance (SC) and the photoplethysmogram (PPG). Four different indices were calculated from the above-mentioned signals:


We compared both the overall videos and the sequences corresponding to the four narrative themes (i.e., territory, product, production techniques, natural landscapes) to explore the impact of the emotional sequence on the affect (AWI, HR and EI indices) and the memorisation (MI index).

This study was intended to help producers identify the most effective communication strategy for territorial agri-food products. We believe it represents an added value, especially for small local realities, helping them to optimise investments and reduce the gap with the big food corporations.

### **2. Materials and Methods**
