Determinants of Consumer Attitudes Toward Prosocial Products: A Focus on the Communication of Love (vs. Pride, Hope, and Compassion) Within Advertisements

Abstract

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.