@article{2023:gierl:determinan,
title = {Determinants of Consumer Attitudes Toward Prosocial Products: A Focus on the Communication of Love (vs. Pride, Hope, and Compassion) Within Advertisements},
year = {2023},
note = {Marketers often use appeals that emphasize the responsibility and the
consequences of consumer decisions to help persons, animals, and
nature in need, or they use appeals that evoke the predominantly
negative emotion of compassion. We focus on another type of appeal
that marketers might use: the promise of experiencing positive
emotions. We use broaden-and-built theory to conclude that the promise
of experiencing positive emotions when helping others increases
consumers’ willingness to engage in prosocial behavior. We use
emotional-appraisal theory to conclude that the promise of
experiencing love is more effective than the promise of experiencing
pride or hope. Our research is innovative in that we tested the
promise of positive emotions. This kind of message can be used in an
advertising environment. We created print advertisements of companies
promoting products that promised the experience of love, pride, or
hope and ad versions that included an appeal for compassion
(supplemented with an emotion-absent condition). The ads promoted
fair-trade products aimed at helping farmers in need, products that
help endangered animal species, and products that addressed nature as
a whole in need. We mostly found support for our hypotheses. However,
the promise of experiencing love by taking care of nature by
purchasing special products was not effective.},
journal = {Marketing ZFP},
pages = {4--29},
author = {Gierl, Heribert},
volume = {45},
number = {1}
}