Advertising Stigmatized Products: Leverage Social Norms or Break the Stigma?

Arti Srivastava, Jayant Nasa, Prakash Satyavageeswaran, Chris Dubelaar and Rajesh Nanarpuzha

Journal of Business Research, 2024, vol. 183, issue C

Abstract: Stigma-leveraging and stigma-disrupting messages are commonly used to promote stigmatized products. However, the relative effectiveness (persuasiveness) of these two advertising approaches remains unexplored. The current research fills this gap by studying consumers’ psychological and attitudinal responses to how the societal stigma around a stigmatized product is deployed (leveraged vs. disrupted) in the ad. Building on the stigma-by-association concept and the identity threat model of stigma, we argue (and show) that stigma-leveraging messages are less persuasive than both stigma-disrupting and stigma-neutral messages. We further show that the low persuasiveness of the stigma-leveraging message (relative to stigma-disrupting/stigma-neutral messages) is due to a devaluation threat it induces, which in turn leads to a lower self-brand connection (serial mediation). Finally, as we find that the persuasiveness of stigma-disrupting messages is no different from that of stigma-neutral messages, we recommend brands of stigmatized products to employ either of these advertising approaches rather than stigma-leveraging messaging.

Keywords: Stigmatized products; Brand communications; Persuasion; Stigma; Identity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0148296324003412
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jbrese:v:183:y:2024:i:c:s0148296324003412

DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2024.114837

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Research is currently edited by A. G. Woodside

More articles in Journal of Business Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().