Self-persuasion as marketing technique: the role of consumers’ involvement

Abstract

Purpose -This paper aims to demonstrate that self-persuasion can be used as a marketing technique to increase consumers' generosity and that the efficacy of this approach is dependent on consumers' involvement with target behavior.Design/methodology/approach -An experimental field-study was conducted to investigate the effects of self-persuasion versus direct persuasion attempts versus no persuasion attempts on consumers' tipping behavior in a lunchroom. Additionally, in a lab experiment, the moderating role of involvement on self-persuasion versus direct persuasion was tested.Findings -The results reveal that self-persuasion is more effective than direct persuasion attempts or no persuasive messages in increasing consumers' generosity. This is moderated by consumers' involvement with the target behavior. For consumers with high involvement, self-persuasion is more effective than direct persuasion, while no differences were found for consumers with moderate or low involvement.Practical implications -The scope of self-persuasion is not limited to the inhibition of undesired behavior, but it also extends to the facilitation of desired behavior, which considerably broadens the scope of this technique. Self-persuasion might be used as a marketing technique to influence consumers' purchase behavior. This might be particularly viable in situations in which consumers feel high involvement with products or behavior.Originality/value -Recently, research in health psychology demonstrated that self-persuasion is a very effective way of inhibiting undesired, addictive behavior and being more successful than direct persuasion. Yet, insufficient knowledge is available about the efficacy of self-persuasion with regard to promoting other

Does Smokers’ Self-Construal Moderate the Effect of (Self-)persuasion on Smoking?

“…Although it is known that how people construe the self could influence self-related cognitive activities, its influence on the effectiveness of self-persuasion is yet to be examined. To the best of our knowledge, self-persuasion studies have until now been exclusively conducted in Western countries (e.g., Baldwin, Rothman, van der Weg, & Christensen, 2013;Bernritter, van Ooijen, & Müller, 2017;Shaw et al, 2015), where people on average hold the independent self-construal (e.g., Cross, et al, 2011;Gudykunst et al, 1996). With regard to smoking, it has been found that question-formulated warning labels successfully increased smoking risk perception and decreased short-term smoking behavior among German and Dutch smokers (Glock, et al, 2013;Müller et al, 2016).…”

Self-Persuasion Increases Healthy Eating Intention Depending on Cultural Background

“…Theoretically, it is one of the first studies introducing culture as a potential moderator in (self-)persuasion literature. It extends the limited understanding of the self-persuasion effect, especially in correcting the impression that self-persuasion is a one-size-fits-all persuasive technique, and adds to the emerging literature showing that several boundary conditions are of influence [37,46,59]. Practically, we hope our results could inspire relevant health agencies with strategies of designing persuasive messages in mass media campaigns, not only targeting people with Western cultural backgrounds, but also more collectivist immigrant groups that are oftentimes not reached through conventional health campaigns.…”

Quick question or intensive inquiry: The role of message elaboration in the effectiveness of self-persuasive anti-alcohol posters

“…Realistically, it will not reduce consumption even close to what is needed to put a dent in alcohol’s contribution to global disease and mortality. Still it should be noted that positive effects in certain situations are found in a relatively new and growing line of experimentation [17–20,26,67]. In these studies self-persuasion has consistently outperformed direct persuasion counterparts and no persuasion controls.…”