Promoting corporate social responsibility message in COVID-19 advertising: How threat persuasion affects consumer responses to altruistic versus strategic CSR.

Given the challenges facing companies in communicating corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives amid the pandemic, this study focuses on the effects of CSR appeals in COVID-19 advertising. Using the Ordered Protection Motivation model and CSR literature as the foundation, this study examined the interaction effect between CSR appeal (altruistic CSR vs. strategic CSR) and threat intensity (low vs. high) of the crisis depiction featured in the ad on consumers' responses. Results revealed the moderating role of threat intensity on the relationships between CSR appeal and consumers' responses, such that altruistic CSR appeal outperformed strategic CSR appeal when consumers were exposed to an ad featuring a high-threat crisis depiction, whereas the two appeals yielded similar effects when the ad featured a low-threat crisis depiction. In particular, altruistic CSR appeal (vs. strategic CSR appeal) generated greater message credibility, stronger feelings of warmth, and lower CSR skepticism, resulting in more favorable ad and brand attitudes and stronger purchase intentions, but only in the high threat condition.

Applying Optimal Foraging to Young Adult Decision-Making after Food Advertising Exposure.

This study combined theory from the fields of communication, behavioral ecology, and ecological psychology to examine how relevant factors about food influence the timing and trajectory of our decision-making after exposure to food advertisements. Young healthy adult participants (N = 108) completed a forced-choice, speeded decision-making latency task before and after viewing a set of advertisements. Results suggested that participants were more appetitively motivated by more energy-dense foods (i.e., higher calorie per gram) using direct food cues (i.e., were directly available to the senses, were visible), but after exposure to advertisements, this predisposition was less pronounced. Advertisement food cues were also important in decision-making, especially in coalition with the food cues used in the decision-making task stimuli. This study supports an optimal foraging perspective being expanded to human behavioral contexts in a modern landscape. Food advertising and packaging cues interacted with energy density level of food to provide information relevant to biological imperatives, which significantly altered food consumption decisions.

Clash of the Primary Motivations: Motivated Processing of Emotionally Experienced Content in Fear Appeals About Obesity Prevention.

This study examined individuals' physiological and cognitive responses to different types of emotionally experienced content located in obesity prevention fear appeals. Results suggested that experienced valence impacted individuals' attention and memory as a function of experienced arousal level. Local content that created coactive highly arousing experiences received the most attention, though visual recognition suggested these messages were more difficult to encode. Local content that created negative moderately arousing experiences was best encoded. Global message evaluation data suggest that moderately arousing messages with a change in experienced valence may prove to be most effective, as they ensure attention and good memory while keeping high self-reported interest, and a high level of perceived severity of obesity. Implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.

Social Facilitation in Fear Appeals Creates Positive Affect but Inhibits Healthy Eating Intentions.

The social facilitation of eating plays a significant role in influencing individuals' eating decisions. However, how social eating cues are processed in health promotion messages is unclear. This study examined individuals' food craving in response to social cues in images (Experiment 1) and emotional experiences, perceived threat, perceived efficacy, behavioral intentions, and motivational coactivation elicited by social eating cues in obesity prevention fear appeals (Experiment 2). Results suggested that the presence of a group of people eating in an image facilitated food craving for the presented foods. Moreover, fear appeals that presented obesity and its consequences with more social eating cues, versus individual eating cues, generated greater positive emotional responses, perceived threat severity, response and self-efficacy, and motivational coactivation indicating more attention and threat vigilance. However, these cues also generated fewer self-reported intentions to change unhealthy eating behaviors. Implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.