Have compassion for the working mother. She gives her
best hours to her employer and then goes home to the
obligations of children, husband, and housework. For many,
it's impossible to do everything well, and the last thing
mothers want to face is ads reminding them of it. Yet that's
exactly what happens when they open magazines like
Good Housekeeping
and
Ladies Home Journal
and see ads with carefully tailored guilt messages targeted
right at them. Some of these ads are subtle, and some
aren't; but their appeal to guilt is unmistakable.
Now consider the other side of these ads and have some
compassion for the people who pay for them. They're
providers of goods and services that stand out as more
healthful, nutritious, and beneficial than the norm, and
their appeal to guilt conceals their inability to appeal to
emotions like fun, excitement, and sexual attraction. Chips,
soft drinks, and beer have taken these appeals. There's
nothing fun or sexy about dental floss, but it's fairly easy
to remind mothers they should provide it for their families.
The trouble is, if you watch the grocery carts go through
check out, they're loaded with chips, soft drinks, and beer,
and you have to wait a long time to see any dental floss or
oatmeal go by. That must be discouraging.
Robin Coulter, of the University of Connecticut, and Mary
Beth Pinto, of Mercyhurst College, are interested in guilt
appeals in advertising, but when they reviewed past research
on the subject, they found a wealth of theory but no
experiments. No one had ever explored the effects of guilt
ads on the attitudes and purchase intentions of real people.
The ad agencies who design these ads and the companies who
pay for them are relying upon untested theories to guide this
effort.
Coulter and Pinto decided to correct this deficiency.
They composed guilt ads concerning white bread and dental
floss varying the guilt appeal (weak, moderate, and strong).
Since so many guilt ads are directed at working mothers, they
worked with this group too, recruiting 60 working mothers,
and testing their ads on them.
When Coulter and Pinto finished their study and reviewed
their data, they found the strongest, most blatant appeals to
guilt generated the strongest sense of guilt in the mothers,
but the ads also made the mothers mad. It's not wise to make
mothers mad, and this group revealed why. Their anger
influenced their attitudes toward the advertisement, the
brand, and toward the company that produced the product. And
not surprisingly, it also affected their intentions to buy
the product. For those reading the strongest ads, the target
products would stay on the shelves.
Feeling guilty means becoming aware that we have violated
a personal standard or code of behavior that we really want
to sustain . . . that we have failed our ideals. Guilt ads
work by reminding us of this failure and binding us to its
source -- the dental floss, for example. This binding to a
source of guilt requires an action on our part to relieve it,
like buying the product (or throwing the magazine out the
window). But if it wasn't a product we really
should
buy or a service we really
should
provide, either for ourselves or for our families, our guilt
couldn't be aroused.
Ad appeals to guilt do stimulate a sense of guilt and they
do motivate people to purchase products or services, but
anger interferes with this effect, and Coulter and Pinto
recommend those who produce such products and use guilt ads
to promote them to rely upon modest appeals to guilt to
arouse a modest sense of guilt. Just enough to get attention
and encourage action, but not enough to generate anger.
Isn't that the goal of advertising anyway?
Reference: Coulter, Robin Higie, and Mary Beth Pinto (1995) Guilt
Appeals in Advertising: What Are Their Effects?
Journal of Applied Psychology,
80 (6), pp. 697-705.
Customer Psychology Findings, by James Larsen, Ph.D.
Guilt Ads
Researches explore the effect of guilt ads on attitudes and purchase intentions.