Author/Abstract Index

Abstract

This study assesses consumer perceptions of advertising messages for two proenvironmental products by examining the effectiveness of environmental versus personal benefit appeals and .99 versus .00 price endings. The authors borrow from Prospect Theory and Mental Accounting Theory to explain consumers' perceptions of psychological pricing and product attributes. In addition, the moderating role of environmental skepticism is assessed as it relates to the effectiveness of environmentally friendly advertisements. Results indicate that consumers feel that some products advertised with environmental appeals are more costly, but are not perceived as lower quality as compared with products advertised with personal benefits. Findings also indicate a price ending × appeal interaction for two different products, but the effects vary between the products. Finally, environmental skepticism is found to moderate perceptions of the message appeal. Implications are provided.     

Authentic isn't always best: When inauthentic social media influencers induce positive consumer purchase intention through inspiration

This study explores whether and how varying levels of social media influencers (SMIs) personal authenticity affect consumer behavior in four experimental studies. Though consumers who perceive SMIs as being authentic express greater intention to purchase products endorsed by the SMIs, authenticity does not influence non-purchase behaviors. SMI authenticity also affects purchase intentions through trustworthiness and inspirational capacity. However, authenticity is not always necessary to influence consumer behavior. Inauthentic SMIs still can inspire consumers and positively influence their intentions to purchase hedonic products. These findings add value to existing literature and can inform effective SMI marketing strategies for various product categories.     

Effects of Consumer Weight Level and Advertising Appeals on Consumer Attitude Toward Food and Advertisements

This study examines the link between consumer weight level, food type, and consumer attitude toward both food and food advertisements. Further, this research explores how food advertisements containing emotional or informational claims influence the attitudes of overweight and normal-weight consumers. Two experiments were conducted to study the interaction between weight levels, food types (meat vs. vegetables), and advertising appeals (emotional vs. informational). The results showed mixed support for the six hypotheses. The findings indicate that consumer weight level interacts with food types, and emotional/information appeals affecting food evaluation and attitudes toward food advertisements. Managerial implications for food manufacturers and advertisers are discussed.     

Behavioural evidence for the effectiveness of threat appeals in the promotion of healthy food to children

The current paper investigates the effectiveness and the persuasion process of threat appeals on children. Disregarded by scholars, probably for ethical reasons, the study of negative appeals targeting 8- to 12-year-olds to promote healthy food seems nevertheless relevant, in the unprecedented context of childhood obesity. To test our assumptions, an experiment was set up with 126 children. Results indicate that the appeal is effective and that the persuasion process of threatening advertisements is led by affective reactions. In contrast to earlier research on older targets, cognitive processes do not improve its effectiveness. Furthermore, exposure to threat appeals increased pre-adolescents’ healthy food consumption in comparison with appeals that may be considered more ‘typical’, such as fun and action. These conclusions and a teleological perspective of ethics invite further study of threat appeals targeting children.     

The influence of consumer mood state as a contextual factor on imagery-inducing advertisements and brand attitude

An experiment was conducted to examine the effects of consumer preexisting mood as a contextual factor on consumers' response to imagery-inducing advertisements. The results showed that positive mood seemed to be the most productive context for an imagery ad. Positive mood increased consumers' positive affective state and increased their subsequent brand attitudes. In addition, the results showed that consumers' mood state can also affect the processing mode consumers actually adopt while viewing an ad, and thus indirectly affect brand attitude. Positive mood state was shown to facilitate the induction of mental imagery processing, and at the same time distract detail-oriented analytical processing. As a result, evaluation of the ad was enhanced. On the other hand, negative mood was shown to reduce the intended mental imagery processing, but it appeared to encourage a detail-oriented analytical processing. As a result, consumers remembered more accurately the specific ad claims, but were not affected as much by the imagery-inducing appeals.     

Restrained by resources: The effect of scarcity cues and childhood socioeconomic status (SES) on consumer preference for feasibility

Scarcity cues are ubiquitous in our everyday lives and thus attract great attention in consumer research. However, little attention has been devoted to examining whether exposure to scarcity cues influences consumers' trade-off between feasibility and desirability in product choices. The present research argues that the impact of scarcity cues on consumers' preference for products that offer more feasible or more desirable features depends on consumers' childhood socioeconomic status (childhood SES). The findings consistently show that consumers with low childhood SES who were reminded of resource scarcity seek more feasibility in product choices than consumers in other conditions. We trace this effect to the fact that scarcity cues cause consumers with low childhood SES to process information at a low construal level. By presenting this conceptualization and evidence, the present study contributes to research on childhood SES, resource scarcity, and construal level theory (CLT).     

The moderating role of construal level on the evaluation of emotional appeal vs. cognitive appeal advertisements

This article proposes that construal level moderates consumer evaluation of different appeals (emotional vs. cognitive appeals) in advertisements. Low-level construal is associated with close psychological distance; this condition implies that people with low-level construal can feel an emotion more intensely than those with high-level construal. Consequently, consumers with low-level construal could positively relate with the emotional appeal ad, and they would evaluate an ad with emotional appeal more favorably than an ad with cognitive appeal. However, this effect does not occur among consumers who construe information at high-level, due to the fact that they are able to focus on the central and positive features of different appeals.     

Problems and challenges in social marketing

This article reviews the problems that arise when general marketing principles are applied to social programs. Social marketing is conceptualized as the design, implementation, and control of programs seeking to increase the acceptability of a social ideal or practice in a target group. These problems can occur in 8 basic decision-making areas: market analysis, market segmentation, product strategy development, pricing strategy development, channel strategy development, communications strategy development, organizational design and planning, and evaluation. Social marketers find that they have less good secondary data about their consumers, more problems obtaining valid and reliable measures of relevant variables, more difficulty sorting out the relative influence of determinants of consumer behavior, and more problems getting consumer research funded than marketers in the commercial sector. They tend to have less flexibility in shaping their products and more difficulty formulating product concepts. Problems associated with establishing, utilizing, and controlling distribution channels comprise another major difference between social and more conventional forms of marketing. Social marketers also find that their communications options are somewhat limited as a result of problems associated with use of paid advertisements, pressures not to use certain types of appeals in their messages, and the need to communicate large amounts of information in their messages. Moreover, social marketers must function in organizations where marketing activities are poorly understood, underappreciated, and inappropriately located. Finally, they face problems trying to define effectiveness measures or estimating the contribution their program has made toward the achievement of certain objectives. If all these problems are anticipated and handled creatively, social marketing efforts can succeed.     

Uncertainty in Prerelease Advertising

Firms frequently advertise products and services before they are launched. Yet how to best design such advertisements is not well understood. The current article investigates how consumers respond to uncertainty in prerelease advertisements. Across five studies, including both field and lab studies, we first provide evidence for the positive effect of uncertain prerelease advertisements using real consumer behavior on Facebook and YouTube and at the box office. Next, we uncover the mechanism underlying this effect (i.e., inflated outcome expectancies), outline a managerially relevant boundary condition (i.e., the positive effect reverses when a preorder opportunity is offered), and demonstrate that the effect of uncertainty on consumer response differs in prerelease versus postrelease advertisements depending on consumers’ perceived risk. Finally, we discuss implications for marketing research as well as for the design of prerelease advertisements for stimulating prerelease buzz and word of mouth.     

Guilt appeals in cause-related marketing

Despite the growth of cause-related marketing (CRM), little is known about how consumers process cause-focused messages that contain emotional appeals. The present research seeks to further the understanding of guilt appeals in CRM by clarifying the moderating roles of product type and donation magnitude, and exploring the situations when a guilt appeal backfires. Although experimental results indicate that a guilt appeal is more effective than a non-guilt appeal, a guilt appeal backfires when the perceived hedonic value of a product is high. A high donation magnitude also eliminates CRM effectiveness of the guilt appeal. There is an interaction between guilt appeal and donation magnitude when promoting hedonic products with CRM. The findings underscore the importance for marketers of learning more about how guilt appeals work, and in turn describe how practitioners can avoid negative consumer reactions to their guilt appeals.     

Race and attitude formation in HIV/Aids fear advertising

The study on which this article is based, examined whether fear appeal advertising increases the likelihood of adopting appropriate behavior and whether different racial groups perceive fear appeals pertaining to HIV/Aids communication differently. The extent of fear, attitude towards the advertisements, as well as threat and efficacy were also investigated to ascertain the influence of different levels of fear appeals.Social marketing programs address various pandemics and anti-social behavior, where citizens act in conflict with accepted social conduct. The use of fear as a motivation in advertising places emphasis on the severity of the threat. Marketing practitioners, believing the message is too difficult to implement, have questioned the use of fear appeal advertising messages.The findings of this study indicate differences among racial groups pertaining to levels of fear and attitude towards advertisements, as well as differences in threat and efficacy experienced after exposure to high fear appeals compared to other appeals.     

Brand Authenticity: Testing the Antecedents and Outcomes of Brand Management's Passion for its Products

While customer orientation is accepted as a core marketing principle, this research suggests that an opposing orientation—product orientation—may offer an advantage. Managers who follow a product orientation focus on products that interest and inspire them rather than on products that fulfill consumers’ desires. This research suggests that a consumer's perception that managers follow a product orientation is consistent with prior conceptualizations of brand authenticity. That research suggests that brands perceived as authentic are evaluated more positively, yet that research does not empirically assess brand authenticity's effects nor suggest its antecedents. To fill this gap, the authors develop a conceptualization and model of brand authenticity grounded in self‐determination theory, attribution theory, and extant authentic human brand research. Brand authenticity is defined as the extent to which consumers perceive that a brand's managers are intrinsically motivated in that they are passionate about and devoted to providing their products. The model proposes four antecedents of brand authenticity—two related to rare brand behaviors (uniqueness and scarcity), and two related to stable brand behaviors (longevity and longitudinal consistency). It also proposes two perceptual outcomes of brand authenticity—expected quality and trust. Two 2 × 2 experiments (n = 136 for Study 1; n = 155 for Study 2) demonstrate a positive impact of the antecedents on brand authenticity and of brand authenticity on the outcomes. Brand authenticity mediates these effects.     

The influence of the corporate social responsibility disclosures on consumer brand attitudes under the impact of COVID-19

This study focuses on the use of we-media by small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to disclose internal corporate social responsibility (ICSR) under the impact of the 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19). Study 1 interprets the catalyst effect of COVID-19 on the externalization of SMEs’ ICSR. The fuzzy grading evaluation method is initially verified. Under the impact of COVID-19, SMEs fulfilling their ICSR can enhance consumer brand attitudes. Study 2 uses a structural equation model and empirical analysis of 946 effective samples and finds that consumers perceive the self-sacrifice of corporations during the coronavirus disease period. SMEs can fulfill their ICSR to enhance the internal explanation mechanism of consumer brand attitudes and the moderating role of enterprise losses.     

The role of brand schemas,information transparency,and source of message on apparel brands' social responsibility communication

In today's complex business environment, apparel brands are communicating about their socially responsible (SR) practices through marketing messages to create a niche for themselves and show their SR efforts. However, SR aspects of products are difficult to verify by consumers. To help brands effectively communicate their SR efforts, this study assessed how consumers process an apparel brand's SR messages based on their prior experiences with that brand (brand schemas). Information transparency on messages and source of messages were tested as external cues to influence consumers' brand schemas and SR message evaluations in a mixed method repeated measures online experiment using a national US consumer sample. Results from regression-based conditional process analyses indicated that increased congruity of consumers' schemas to the fact that brands are SR led to more favorable attitude toward brands' SR messages. Also, presence of high information transparency on SR messages influenced consumers' schemas positively, and in turn, they evaluated messages more favorably. However, consumers were not influenced by whether messages were made by brands or third-party organizations. The study results show the importance of brand schemas and information transparency on apparel brand communications, helping both apparel brands and educators create effective SR-related marketing strategies.     

Consumers under pandemic anxiety: Suppressors,intensifiers, and resilients

COVID-19 turned the lives of all people across the world upside down. Everyone faced the threat of catching the virus and denial of access to the physical marketplace. For many, it also brought the threat of partial or full unemployment. This trinity of upheaval produced heightened anxiety. The purpose of this article is to understand how consumers coped with anxiety during the pandemic and lockdown periods. We hypothesized that consumers coped with such anxiety by engaging in diverse creative and productive activities, which served as anxiety suppressors. In addition, we hypothesized that one's enduring mind positivity provided resilience and helped consumers mitigate their anxiety. In survey data from a random sample of 550 consumers in the United States, we found support for these hypotheses. Consumers who engaged in voluntary productive activities suffered less anxiety. And consumers with higher resilience levels also felt lower levels of anxiety. In addition, we found that enjoyment of shopping intensified the experience of COVID-19-induced anxiety. The research framework linking this specific set of antecedents to COVID-induced anxiety and its affirmation in this study are new to the literature and therefore offer a notable contribution to it. These findings show two pathways to marketers: Organize and promote voluntary productive activities and offer means for consumers to cultivate personal resilience, on for-profit and not-for-profit platforms. Also, we suggest a future consumer research agenda for when fate again brings us face-to-face with similar or even lesser catastrophes, which, according to scientific forecasters, it sadly but surely will.     

The communicative effectiveness of ethnically oriented advertising

A study conducted on Asian ethnic consumers in the UK showed ethnic origin to be a major segmentation variable in differentiating ethnic and white intergroup responses to four different executions of advertising copy incorporating different levels of ethnic appeal. The ethnic group gave consistently more favourable responses than white consumers, implying that they would respond more favourably to the visual ‘picture’ component in advertising copy. On an intragroup basis it was found that ‘all-ethnic’ copy with higher levels of ethnic content would be more effective in targeting ethnic groups because it provides a cultural framework with greater staying power in terms of its visual, nonverbal presentation in comparison to ‘all-white’ appeals. ‘Integrated’ panel layouts incorporating both ethnic and white appeals in the same advertising copy format did not evoke significantly more positive feelings among either Asian ethnic or white viewers in comparison to ‘all-ethnic’ copy. Advertisers should note therefore that integrated advertisements cannot be expected to radically influence either ethnic or white consumer attitudes towards promoted products. It was also found that as a compromise strategy, ‘product-only’ advertisements might well be the best answer to targeting ethnic as well as white viewers.     

内疚广告诉求对消费者道德消费意愿的影响机制研究

基于认知失调理论和心理抗拒理论,通过两个实验探究了企业道德营销中内疚与非内疚诉求影响消费者道德消费意愿的心理作用机制。结果表明,内疚诉求比非内疚诉求更能促进消费者的道德消费意愿,强迫性感受和操纵意图推断发挥了中介作用,且该中介作用受到消费者涉入度的调节。具体而言,低消费者涉入度情境中,相比于非内疚诉求,内疚诉求能够降低消费者的强迫性感受和操纵意图推断,进而增强其道德消费意愿;高消费者涉入度情境中,相比于内疚诉求,非内疚诉求能够降低消费者的强迫性感受和操纵意图推断,进而增强其道德消费意愿。研究结论有助于企业设计道德属性产品的广告策略,有效降低受众心理抗拒反应,提升受众广告体验,进而推动道德消费。     

Green Demarketing in Advertisements: Comparing “Buy Green” and “Buy Less” Appeals in Product and Institutional Advertising Contexts

This research compares consumer response to traditional green advertising appeals to that of less conventional, “green demarketing” (GD) appeals—messages by for-profit companies encouraging reduced category consumption for the sake of the environment. Rather than encouraging greener consumption, modern environmentalism calls for decreased consumption overall, a trend reflected in recent advertising campaigns (e.g., Patagonia's “Don't Buy This Jacket”). Despite its potential impact and unconventionality, research on GD in general is sparse, and no empirical research has examined consumer response to GD appeals relative to traditional green appeals. In three experiments, we find that, in the context of product advertising, consumers' attitudes for green ads are more favorable than those for GD ads, mediated by greater inferences of genuine environmental concern. However, we find the reverse pattern in the context of institutional ads. Further, an “anti-consumption amplifier” message embedded in the ad—espousing the potential harm of overconsumption—further boosts favorable consumer attitudes for the GD institutional ad relative to its traditional green counterpart. Importantly, we assess all effects while controlling for consumers' individual levels of green consumerism, such that implications may be applied more generally rather than to a specific segment of green consumers.     

Who will embrace upward line extension? The role of power distance belief

Upward line extension is a significant strategy for enterprise brand management and market expansion. However, a new status product launched by a non-status brand through upward line extension inevitably forms a competitive relationship with the status product launched by a status brand. Based on the categorization theory, this study explores the influence of status product type (non-extended status product, upward-extended status product) on consumer responses and its potential psychological mechanisms. Furthermore, it examines the moderating role of power distance belief (PDB) in the relationship between status product type and consumer responses. The results indicate that consumers develop lower product evaluations and purchase intentions for upward-extended status products compared to non-extended status products (Studies 1, 2a, 2b, and 2c). Perceived fit and signaling effectiveness mediate the effect of status product type on consumer responses (Study 1). More importantly, PDB moderates the effect of status product type on consumer responses, as high-PDB consumers respond similarly to upward-extended and non-extended status products, whereas low-PDB consumers respond more negatively to upward-extended status products compared to non-extended status products (Studies 2a, 2b, and 2c). Perceived fit and signaling effectiveness mediate the interaction effect between PDB and status product type on consumer responses (Studies 2a and 2b). This study augments the literature on vertical brand extension and PDB, and provides practical guidance for marketers intending to launch upward line extension.