When ads shock: subtle ways that disgust can shape our buying habits

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Companies use them to confront us with difficult emotions or go against societal norms as a means of grabbing our attention. Dettol, for example, once created an advertisement for its hygiene products that depicted a bloodied hand in front of the body of a man with a knife through his chest, alongside the words “When ordinary soap just won’t do”.

Such techniques are known as “shockvertising”, and there is no shortage of examples. In a recent paper, we explore the subtle ways in which powerful negative images influence consumers. The objective is often to grab attention and battle through the advertising clutter, and while such images get our attention, the effects might be more nuanced than marketers realise.

To date, research into the phenomenon has mostly focused on whether or not it works. In an attention-fuelled marketing landscape, using shock to force consumers to notice campaigns – acting like a kind of override switch – might be an appealing idea. But there could be a lot more to it than meets the eye.

Disgust is not a single emotion

We wanted to understand not only the impact of shockvertising but also how strong and shocking imagery affect those who see it. Does it make any difference to the viewer’s emotional reaction if an image is morally repugnant, rather than frightening or physically repulsive? And how much of that reaction would they be consciously aware of?

There is currently a mismatch between what we understand about the nature of disgust and how marketers treat it. In the world of psychology, disgust is viewed as a complex and varied phenomenon, but marketers typically don’t look at the different types of disgust.

Psychologists identify distinct kinds of disgust, each one stirring up a set of behavioural, physiological and psychological responses. Disgust may be physical, as in the reaction to rotten food or body fluids, or moral, like when we feel outraged by behaviours like racism or violence. Some researchers distinguish types of disgust even further, linking them to feelings of threat to different parts of our social, moral and bodily safety.

How disgust steers us toward subconscious spending

According to our research, ideas that threaten a person’s self-concept can influence his or her behaviour on a subconscious level. Our sense of self is quite stable over time, and we are motivated to maintain the factors that protect our sense of identity – things like control, self-esteem and a sense of belonging. When something comes along to destabilise us, we’ll take steps to regain our psychological equilibrium.

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For example, if someone has had a bad day at work that threatens his or her sense of status or power, they want to feel better about themselves. One response is to purchase or display products that are symbolic of status or power, such as luxury products. That temporarily boosts the sense of self, even if it’s not necessarily a conscious process.

The same urge to regulate our sense of self can come into play when a disgusting or distressing image enters our consciousness. Images of physical disgust can threaten our sense of personal control and power. And one of the ways we can re-establish it is through consumption.

Different kinds of disgust, different spending decisions

The team’s research explored how respondents altered their behaviour after looking at disgust-eliciting stimuli in lab-based and online studies.

Based on previous research, the prediction was that morally disgusting stimuli would create a feeling of disruption to shared moral standards and reduce feelings of belongingness, resulting in behaviour that could restore belongingness and relationships – such as donating to charity or helping others. In contrast, physically disgusting stimuli were predicted to threaten a person’s sense of power and control, resulting in compensatory consumption behaviour to restore feelings of power, such as engaging in conspicuous status consumption.

These predictions were confirmed across eight experiments carried out using in-person and online testing environments. The participants were exposed to written, graphic and video-based stimuli designed to generate either disgust reactions or neutral responses. Later, the participants completed a second study in which their behaviour was assessed for compensatory or pro-social, helping activity. A meta-analysis was then carried out on the collected results.

The results show that compared to a control group (neutral stimuli), the study participants who were exposed to the moral disgust stimuli showed a significant tendency toward donating more to charities and helping others in a later study. For the physical disgust stimuli group, the trend was toward preferring larger brand logos and other signifiers of conspicuous consumption. Thus different types of disgust have qualitatively different effects on the self-concept.

Subtle effects

The study did not determine if there was a strong causal relationship between types of shockvertising material and consumer responses – it isn’t a case of pulling a lever and getting a predictable result. Rather, there may be additional subtle effects for marketers to bear in mind when they employ shockvertising tactics that grab attention. While such images can grab attention by eliciting extreme emotions, they may have other effects on the self-concept that may work for the market or may not necessarily be desirable.

For marketers, the research shows that strong images should be selected carefully, depending on the type of behaviour the publishers hope to trigger. The research also highlights that strong and emotive content may have behavioural effects that have not yet been discovered. Therefore, strong or disgusting images should generally be used with caution.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.