Guilt appeals in cause-related marketing

Abstract

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.

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Chun-Tuan Chang

Chun-Tuan Chang is an associate professor at the Department of Business Management, National Sun Yat-sen University. She received her PhD from the University of Edinburgh. Current research interests include advertising, consumer information processing, green marketing and corporate philanthropic influences on consumer behaviour. Her papers have been published in Psychology & Marketing, Journal of Advertising Research, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Advances in Consumer Research and elsewhere.