People's self‐regulatory focus may determine the effectiveness of stop‐smoking campaigns. An experiment with 226 young smokers investigated the persuasiveness of different emotional appeals for different self‐regulatory foci. A congruency effect emerges for attitude toward the advertisement and behavioral intentions: Young smokers with a promotion focus are more persuaded by sadness–joy than fear–relief campaigns, and the opposite is true for those with a prevention focus. As predicted by the regulatory relevancy principle, ad involvement mediates this effect.

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An experiment was conducted to examine the effect on adolescents of different health appeals (healthy versus unhealthy) in ads for healthy and unhealthy perceived foods. The results did not reveal a main effect of product or slogan, but indicated a significant interaction effect between slogan and product. The healthy slogan only led to significantly more positive attitudes and purchase intentions when it promoted a healthy food product. An unhealthy food product received better results in combination with an unhealthy slogan than with a healthy one. This indicates that adolescents react better to ads in which the health appeal is congruent with the health perception of the product. Moreover, we took into account gender and health concern as potential moderators in the relationship between slogan and ad responses. Gender did not lead to different responses to healthy or unhealthy food ads, whereas health concern did interact significantly with the slogan type. Highly concerned adolescents responded more favorably to a healthy slogan in terms of attitudes. A necessary first step seems to be making adolescents more health conscious. A following step is to reinforce their positive attitudes toward healthy foods and turn these into real behavior.

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