Evidence of mortality salience and psychological defenses in bottled water campaigns

ABSTRACT

Environmental campaigns provide information to encourage people to alter their behaviors but with mixed success. Terror Management Theory (TMT)—and the influence of mortality reminders—offers a useful framework for understanding environmentally significant behaviors, and provides critical insights for developing more effective environmental communications. TMT indicators guided our analysis of Canadian corporate, pro-bottled water advertising, and public, anti-bottled water campaigns. We found that pro-bottled water advertisements had a greater capacity to manage death anxieties because they better support the audiences' self-esteem, provide the audience with opportunities to engage in worldview defense, and symbolically extend the consumers' perceived lifespan.