Advertisers Theories of Consumers: Why Use Negative Emotions to Sell?

This paper explores the views of advertising professionals regarding consumers, and uses them as a framework to compare practitioner and academic theories regarding negative emotional appeals in advertising. We identify three broad views of consumers that appear to guide advertisers when they develop ads: (1) a “desensitized consumer” who pays little attention to advertising; (2) a “sophisticated consumer” who is conscious of advertisers’ persuasive intentions and skilled at recognizing specific tactics, and; (3) a “tribal consumer” who is driven by a fundamental need to be accepted as part of a larger group. In addition to identifying areas of agreement and discrepancy between practitioner and academic theories, our research exposes interesting limitations in the working theories of advertising professionals. We also argue that dialogue between academics and practitioners provides an opportunity to enhance advertising theory and practice, and suggest that our approach could be widely applied for this purpose. When seeking to persuade consumers and stir them to action, advertising professionals select tactics based on their understanding of the effects these tactics are likely to produce. It follows, then, that the design of real-world ads is not necessarily driven by formal academic theory, but by the beliefs held by these professionals about the consequences of using various tactics and the moderating conditions that make such techniques more or less effective. Notwithstanding this fact–and in spite of the occasional bemoaning of it in the literature–there have been relatively few efforts to study the implicit theories of advertising professionals regarding “what works,” and compare these to the research-based models developed by academics (Kover 1995, is a notable exception). This paper helps to address this shortcoming by exploring general views of advertising agency creative staff regarding consumers, and using these as an organizing framework to compare practitioner and academic theories in an important but under-researched domain–namely, the use of negative emotions in advertising. Such efforts to tap into the minds of practitioners are helpful for a variety of reasons–some less apparent than others. Most directly, they offer insight into the thinking that drives marketing practice. This is useful in its own right as a descriptor of prevailing industry sentiment on how best to influence consumers, since practitioners may hold different views from academics despite employing the same terminology (Cornelissen 2002). Moreover, observing such sentiment and its changes over time provides a basis for explaining the emergence and relative prevalence of specific advertising tactics and types of appeals in the marketplace. This can serve, among other things, as a source of guidance for public policymakers and social scientists seeking to draw connections between advertising and its impact on society. A less direct but equally important benefit is that the implicit theories of advertisers offer a fresh and distinctly different perspective on the nature of consumers and their response to negativeemotion appeals. While they can scarcely be characterized as superior to formal academic models, practitioner theories have the virtue of a very different set of strengths and limitations: Although they are data- rather than theory-driven and only informally and subjectively tested, they are also descriptive of behavior in a naturalistic setting, based on extensive replication across a wide variety of product categories and ad types, and pragmatic with respect to their implications. Moreover, practitioner theories are not usually designed to abstract from the particular to the general, so they do not tend to disregard finer aspects of the phenomenon as academic theories often do, and capture insights that the latter may overlook (Brinberg and Hirschman 1986). As a final and added benefit, practitioner theories also tend to be grounded in the response of real audiences rather than student subjects, making them a useful “reality check” on academic theories that are based on student data. The task of identifying and cataloging the full range of these practitioner theories is a daunting one. Accordingly, for the purposes of this paper we were somewhat less ambitious: After eliciting general comments regarding the nature of consumers, we probed advertising creative staff about their theories in a very specific domain in which the authors had some experience–the effectiveness of using negative emotions in advertising, and the conditions under which such a tactic might be more or less effective. This is a promising area to explore, in large part because appeals which seek to evoke negative emotions represent an increasingly common (Huhmann and Brotherton 1997) but under-researched advertising tactic. Just as importantly, the academic literature has struggled to adequately specify the conditions under which such approaches will be more or less effective. The paper begins with a brief review of the academic literature on the use of negative emotional appeals in advertising, in order to provide context for our research and set the stage for our own findings. We then present the results of our phenomenological interviews with advertising creative personnel, organized around three main views of consumers that emerged from these informants. Based on these findings, we propose a conceptual framework that summarizes these practitioner theories-in-use and relates them to their academic counterparts, with the goal of identifying commonalities and inconsistencies that suggest avenues for future research. We then conclude with a discussion of the implications of our research for advertising theory in general, and for the effectiveness of negative-emotion appeals in particular.