Fear, guilt, and shame appeals in social marketing

Linda Brennan and Wayne Binney

Journal of Business Research, 2010, vol. 63, issue 2, 140-146

Abstract: This paper presents the results from a qualitative study of income support recipients with regard to how they feel about advertising which overtly appeals to their sense of fear, guilt and shame. The motivation of the study was to provide formative research for a social marketing campaign designed to increase compliance with income reporting requirements. This study shows that negative appeals with this group of people are more likely to invoke self-protection and inaction rather than an active response such as volunteering to comply. Social marketers need to consider the use of fear, guilt and shame to gain voluntary compliance as the study suggests an overuse of these negative appeals. While more formative research is required, the future research direction aim would be to develop an instrument to measure the impact of shame on pro-social decision-making; particularly in the context of close social networks rather than the wider society.

Keywords: Compliance; Fear; Guilt; Shame; advertising; message; appeals; Social; marketing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (41)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0148-2963(09)00030-7
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:63:y:2010:i:2:p:140-146

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 ().