Abstract: Enterprises often use affirmative sentence or negative sentence in advertisements to demonstrate the positive or non- negative properties of the products to consumers.  Few studies have compared the differences in consumer responses to these two types of slogans.  Based on the negation bias theory, this paper explored the interaction between brand position and advertising sentence pattern on consumers’ advertising evaluation and attention and its mechanism.  The results of three experiments showed that： for the leader brand, consumers would have a more positive evaluation and pay more attention to the affirmative (vs.negative) slogan ； for the challenger brand, the negative slogan is more effective for the promotion of consumers’ advertising evaluations and attention than the affirmative slogan.  The perceived reliability of the leader brand and the perceived creativity of the challenger brand respectively mediated the affirmative slogan's and negative slogan's positive effect on the two types of brands.  This study enriches the literature on the persuasive effect of sentence pattern and brand position, and provides marketing implications for brand managers on how to choose the appropriate slogans.

Key words: slogan , sentence pattern , brand position , advertising evaluation , attention