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2016 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

The After-Effects of Fear-Inducing Public Service Announcements

Authors : Udo Wagner, Claus Ebster, Lisa Eberhardsteiner, Madeleine Prenner

Published in: Dynamic Perspectives on Managerial Decision Making

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

Messages using fear appeals often appear in social marketing, to promote causes such as smoking cessation, healthcare and driving accident prevention. Fear appeals can enhance the effectiveness of such communications, but they also may have unintended side effects. This study investigates the effect of fear-inducing public service announcements on evaluations of subsequent commercials in a commercial break. In two laboratory experiments, the authors measured participants’ evaluations of advertisements using a program analyzer. In line with affective priming theory, the results showed that fear-inducing public service announcements can negatively affect evaluations of subsequent commercials.

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Footnotes
1
We use the expression advertising effectiveness in a broad, common sense here but concede that there are many different measures of advertising effectiveness used in the literature: attitude towards to ad, awareness, liking, recall, persuasiveness etc.
 
2
Differences in depth of theoretical reasoning and level of detail cause the terminological difference between hypothesis and research question.
 
3
The empirical research analyzes the effect of two exposures of the same fear-inducing PSA on the subsequent neutral commercial. Because of this rather limited scope we do not claim, however, this project to be a comprehensive investigation of effects of multiple (i.e. more than double) exposures.
 
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Metadata
Title
The After-Effects of Fear-Inducing Public Service Announcements
Authors
Udo Wagner
Claus Ebster
Lisa Eberhardsteiner
Madeleine Prenner
Copyright Year
2016
Book
Dynamic Perspectives on Managerial Decision Making

Print ISBN: 978-3-319-39118-2

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-39120-5

Copyright Year: 2016

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39120-5_22