Charity advertising: congruence between political orientation and cause of need

Abstract

Philanthropic appeals are more persuasive if messages match the processing styles of potential donors. To help marketers design more congruent charity appeals, the authors conduct two experiments testing a new type of congruence: political orientations that determine donor reactions to charity appeals for alleviating poverty. Korean student samples are used in a 2 (political orientation: conservatives and liberals) X 2 (causes of need: internal/dispositional and external/social) between-subjects design. Findings show that liberal donors respond more favourably to appeals that use external attributions blaming social causes, and conservative donors respond more favourably to appeals that use internal attributions blaming individual failings. The authors further use moderated mediation analysis to demonstrate that two distinct paths explain the effect: causes of need and resulting perceived controllability influence empathy for liberals and outcome efficacy for conservatives. The findings will help charity marketers better understand how donor segments will react to charity appeals.

Keywords:

• political
• liberal
• conservative
• philanthropic
• donation
• social marketing
• charity advertising

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Individuals tend to have either fixed or growth mindsets that will cause them to form different judgments and reactions (Dweck, Chiu, and Hong 1995). Individuals who have fixed mindsets tend to believe that human attributes are fixed and unchangeable; those who have growth mindsets tend to believe that human attributes are dynamic, malleable, and developable.

2 70.8% of the respondents marked lower than the midpoint, leaning toward liberal. Therefore, by liberals and conservatives, we actually mean relative liberals and conservatives. We treated the scale as a continuous variable in our analyses and did not split the sample into liberals and conservatives.

3 In a similar yet unrelated study we conducted in the U.S., we found high correlation (r = .583, p < .01) between this manipulation check and a new item that measured perceived responsibility: “To what extent do you think the homeless are responsible for losing their jobs and homes?” The high correlation validates the manipulation check and conceptualization, confirming that our cause of need manipulation determined perceptions of recipient blame.

4 61.8% of the participants marked lower than the midpoint, somewhat skewed toward the left.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Younghwa Lee

Younghwa Lee (Ph.D., Hankuk University of Foreign Studies) is a research professor in the Department of Media and Communication at Sungkyunkwan University. Previously she was a visiting scholar at Bryant University. Her research focuses on advertising and consumer behavior and appears in Journal of Public Policy and Marketing and Asian Journal of Communications, among others.

Joon Yong Seo

Joon Yong Seo (Ph.D., University of Utah) is an Associate Professor in the School of Business & Management at SUNY Brockport. His research focuses on consumer behavior. He has published articles in Marketing Letters, Psychology & Marketing, Journal of Consumer Marketing, among others.

Sukki Yoon

Sukki Yoon (Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) is a Professor in the Department of Marketing at Bryant University. He was a visiting scholar at Grey Worldwide and Harvard University and a consultant at U.S. and Korean firms and government agencies. He has published articles in many international journals and has served on editorial boards.