Introduction​: Market has saturated in the point where customers are facing advertising overload. For companies it can be difficult task to achieve attention among desired target audience. Millennials have become one of the most valuable target group that companies are aiming to target. One way to achieve attention is to do provocative advertising that aims to shock, or violate millennials norms, principles or social cause. Millennials is a special demographic group, compared to previous ones, baby boomers and generation X, since they are more resistant towards provocation. Thys, thesis stress the importance of exploring millennials emotional response when they are exposed to provocation. Purpose: ​The purpose of this paper is to explore Millennials ́ emotional response when exposed to provocative advertising. Research Questions: ‘​Which negative emotions provoke millennials?’ and ‘Which positive emotions provoke millennials?’ Theoretical Framework: ​Theory foundation is builded on provocative advertising and emotional response. Provocative advertising is divided into shock, and social cause. Emotional response concentrates on positive and negative emotions. Method: ​The authors of this paper used qualitative approach, deductive structure with explorative purpose that is aiming for in-depth information. Total amount of 8 semi-structured interviews were recorded. Information from interviews were further comprehended via coding schedule. Empirical Investigation: ​Empirical chapter presents the main patterns of information from interviews. Chapter is divided into negative and positive parts. This chapters are following the coding schedule structure where main chapters are divided into subchapters based on the sub-categories of coding schedule. Analysis: ​The analysis of the empirical investigation showed important information regarding millennials emotional response. Analysis presented that negative emotional response of fear, anger, sadness and disgust are evoked when millennials are exposed to provocative advertising. While emotional response of positive emotions, millennials expressed emotional response of contentment to provocative advertising. Thus, no emotional response of love, pride, or happiness was found. Conclusion: ​Conclusion of the thesis presented the important findings that millennials are more likely expressing negative than positive emotional response when they are exposed to provocative advertising. Thus emotional response of fear, anger, sadness, disgust or/and contentment were Millennials emotional response to provocative advertising.

Consumers are actively avoiding advertising, which has made the advertising landscape more challenging, resulting in the implementation of other strategies. Provocative advertising is a strategy implemented to make a strong impression on the consumers. However, the discussion of consumers becoming more and more resistant towards advertising lifts the question of provocative advertisement as an effective strategy. Digital natives is the part of the population who are the most exposed to information on online platforms, therefore the question of lessening of response to provocative advertisement from the digital natives is investigated. As emotional response previously has been used to understand the effect advertising elicits from consumers, the purpose of this research is to describe the emotional responses digital natives have towards provocative advertising. The empirical material gathered has been among digital natives in Växjö, Sweden, studying their emotional response towards the seven types of provocative advertising provided within the theoretical framework. The focus group consisted of four different gatherings, with six participants in each in order to create an understanding of how digital natives perceive provocative advertising and resulted in an understanding of the effectiveness of it. The results indicate that provocative advertising does evoke emotions. Specifically, the advertisements that include a cause or message evoked more emotions from the digital natives, and therefore is an effective strategy to implement from a practical perspective. The result also allowed for an understanding that digital natives expressed more resistance towards expressing their emotions rather than showing specific resistance towards the provocative advertising itself, which is recommended by this study for further research

I en värld där konsumenten dagligen överöses av kommersiella budskap är det många gånger svårt, för att inte säga omöjligt, för företag att synas. Ett tuffare klimat kräver tuffare tillvägagångssätt, vilket har resulterat i nya marknadsföringsmetoder. En av dessa nya metoder är provokativ marknadsföring som vänder sig till betraktarens känslor genom provokation. Provokativ reklam och dess effekter på konsumenter har undersökts tidigare. Dessa studier har emellertid övervägande fokuserat på provokation i form av sexuella stimuli, varför det råder stor osäkerhet om hur andra provokationsformer i reklamsammanhang mottas av konsumenter. Som ett första led att ge råd i denna fråga har därför en kvalitativ studie med fokusgrupper som undersökningsmetod utförts, i syfte att identifiera vilken typ av känslor och attityder som väcks hos konsumenter när de exponeras för provokativ reklam innehållande andra element än sex, nakenhet och erotik. Fyra reklamfilmer innehållande provocerande element har studerats och resultaten visar att nämnd form av provokation väcker många känslor som är av både bipolärt och komplext slag. De attityder till avsändaren som uppstår har visat sig vara av främst positivt slag när ändamålet är gott. Vidare har provokativ reklam visat sig vara mer lämplig när målet är att uppnå erinran snarare än att informera om specifika produkter. / In a world where consumers are showered with commercial messages, being noticed is hard, not to say impossible. A tougher climate requires tougher approaches, which has led to new marketing methods. One of those new methods is provocative advertising, which appeals to the consumer’s feelings by means of provocation. Provocative advertising and its effects on consumers might have been studied before. However, those studies have mainly been focused on provocation in terms of sexual stimulus. How other provocations than those affect consumers are therefore associated with a lot of insecurity. As a first step in giving advice in this matter, a qualitative study with focus groups has been executed, with the aim of identifying which kind of feelings and attitudes take place in the consumers’ mind after being exposed for provocative TV commercials, including other elements than sex, nudity and erotic. Four TV commercials containing provocative elements have been studied and the results show that the kind of provocation mentioned above raises a lot of feelings which are both bipolar and complex. The attitudes to the sender that arises have appeared to be positive when it is for a good purpose. Provocative advertising furthermore appears to be more useful when the aim is to remind consumers rather than giving information about specific products.