Vigilant against Manipulation: The Effect of Regulatory Focus on the Use of Persuasion Knowledge

Abstract

This article proposes that compared with a promotion regulatory focus, a prevention focus increases sensitivity to the advertiser's manipulative intent. Specifically, when message cues make manipulative intent moderately salient, prevention-focused people are more likely to activate persuasion knowledge and give less favorable brand evaluations than promotion-focused people. When message cues make manipulative intent highly salient or when manipulative intent is not salient, brand evaluations do not differ across regulatory foci. In addition, externally priming suspicion of manipulative intent makes promotion-focused people react similarly to prevention-focused people, suggesting that regulatory focus affects vigilance against persuasion.

La advertencia del intento persuasivo en contextos publicitarios

“…En este sentido, el mencionado Modelo del Conocimiento de la Persuasión (Friestad y Wright, 1994;1995) sugiere que las creencias que las personas tienen sobre el funcionamiento de la persuasión en la publicidad y en el marketing pueden jugar un papel importante en cómo esas personas responden a los intentos persuasivos. Específicamente, uno de los motivos por los cuales las personas tienden a resistirse a un mensaje publicitario es que su sola presentación en términos de publicidad comercial advierte al receptor por adelantado de que se le está intentado persuadir (e.g., Brown y Krishna, 2004;Campbell y Kirmani, 2000;Kirmani y Zhu, 2007;Quinn y Woods, 2004;Zuwerink y Devine, 1996). Esta intención persuasiva manifiesta de la publicidad contribuye a que el público, en general, desarrolle actitudes que van desde ambivalentes hasta negativas hacia la propia publicidad (e.g., considerarla como algo falso y engañoso, Calfee y Ringold, 1994).…”

The relationship between regulatory focus and online shopping - perceived risk, affect, and consumers' response to online marketing

“…Response to online marketing in the context of this study refers to a consumer's action and attention upon encountering an online marketing event, which may take the form of clicking on an advert, visiting a web retailer as a result of an email offer, accepting a crossselling recommendation and so on. While Walsh (2010) Specifically, promotion focused consumers have been shown to be more adventurous, variety-seeking and risk prone (Friedman and Forster, 2001) On the other hand, prevention focused consumers are known to be biased toward self-control, achievement of predetermined goals and to exhibit distrust behaviour toward online marketing (Kirmani and Zhu, 2007) Therefore, we propose that:…”

The Effect of Inconsistent Product Attribute Reviews on Consumers’ Purchase Intention

“…When the input is greater than output, the consumer will be less willing to buy, but when the output is greater than input, consumers will be more willing to buy (Aggarwal, 2004). The intra-attribute ambivalence may increase the consumer's resistance and skepticism (Kirmani & Zhu, 2007), and the information processing fluency becomes low. Consumers may suffer a big loss with high perceived risk.…”