The effects of tolerance of negativity on consumers’ responses to comparative attack advertising

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on ‘tolerance of negativity’ (TON) as a means of understanding and predicting consumers’ responses to negative marketing communications. The results of three empirical studies suggest that consumers who are low (as opposed to high) in TON (when measured and/or primed) find negatively framed comparative ads to be less fair, less useful, and have less favorable attitudes toward the ad and sponsor brand. Importantly, cognitive elaboration is shown to moderate these effects. Specifically, one’s TON is found to be more impactful when individuals are engaged with an ad (i.e. when cognitive elaboration is greater) as opposed to when cognitive elaboration is lower. Interestingly, TON’s moderating influence was not observed in any of the studies when attitudes toward the compared-to brand were the dependent variable.

KEYWORDS:

• Tolerance
• negativity
• attack advertising
• consumer responses

Notes

1. The steps in developing and the psychometric properties (reliability and validity) associated with the TON scale are reported in Vijayalakshmi, Laczniak, and Muehling (2015).

2. This statement is not meant to dismiss or ignore the work of researchers who have examined TON in other research domains. Particularly noteworthy are the works of Fridkin and Kenney (2011) and Hibbing, Smith, and Alford (2014), which have focused on individuals’ tolerance of negative political ad campaigns and political ideologies.

3. Due to space limitations, we did not report the findings of an additional study we conducted that employed a negatively framed comparative TV ad for Nissan automobiles as our ad stimulus. Study participants (n = 86) were placed into high and low negativity tolerance groups based upon a tertile split of their responses to the five-item TON scale. Consistent with the findings reported in the main text of this paper, we found a significant effect of TON on participants’ attitudes toward the ad (F(1,54) = 2.37, p < .01) and attitude toward Nissan, the sponsor brand (F(1,54) = 2.81, p < .01). Low-TON individuals held significantly less favorable attitudes toward the ad (M = 4.47 vs. 5.64; t(54) = 3.77, p < .01) and sponsor brand (M = 4.79 vs. 5.72; t(54) = 3.78, p < .01), than did high-TON individuals.