Preventive Against a Sad Charitable Appeal: How Regulatory Focus Changes the Effectiveness of Emotion Appeals in Soliciting Donations

摘要

Negative emotion appeals have been the predominant type of appeal used in charity ads (Huhmann & Botherton, 1997). In fact, research studies have shown mixed findings about whether negative emotion appeals help raise charitable giving or provoke skepticism instead. For instance, Pancer et al. (1979a) and Pancer (1988) found that negative emotion appeals demotivate charitable giving compared to neutral appeals, whereas others have shown the complete opposite (Small & Verrochi, 2009). We propose that potential donors' emotional and behavioral responses towards a given negative charity appeal—whether they experience the desired emotion and contribute to charity, or demonstrate skepticism and withhold their giving—would depend on their regulatory orientation. Because a prevention focus (vs. a promotion focus) enhances vigilance against the advertiser's manipulative intent (Kirmani & Zhu, 2007), we predict that a negative emotion appeal would be more likely to instigate potential donors' skepticism when the donors are under a prevention focus, compared to when they are under a promotion focus. Consequently, under a prevention focus (vs. a promotion focus), the skepticism toward the negative emotion appeal would disrupt the intended emotional response from the prospective donors and discourage their donation.