Disgust in Ads Isn’t Just About Shock - It Shapes Behavior

Whether it’s a hungry child in a war zone or a polar bear on a shrinking raft of ice, shocking images are a feature of advertising we are all familiar with.

Advertisers use images that confront us with difficult emotions or go against societal norms as a means of grabbing our attention - a phenomenon known as ‘shockvertising.’

Dettol, for example, once created an advertisement for its hygiene products that depicted a bloodied hand in front of the dead body of a man with a knife through his chest, alongside the words ‘When ordinary soap just won’t do.’

Advertisers will try to use strong emotions like disgust to capture attention because it’s something that's completely out of the ordinary. It violates all the expectations of an advertisement by showing a remarkable image and somehow associating it with the brand. The objective is often to grab attention and battle through the advertising clutter.

To date, research into the phenomenon has mostly focused on whether or not it works. In an attention-fuelled marketing landscape, using shock to force consumers to notice campaigns - acting like a kind of override switch - might be an appealing prospect. But we suspected there was a lot more to it than meets the eye.

With my co-author Elena Fumagalli, I wanted to understand not only the impact of shockvertising but also how various kinds of strong and shocking imagery affect those who see them. Does it make any difference to the viewer’s emotional reaction if an image is morally repugnant, rather than frightening or physically repulsive? And how much of that reaction would they be consciously aware of?

There is currently a mismatch between what we understand about the nature of disgust and how marketers treat it. In the world of psychology, disgust is viewed as a complex and varied phenomenon, but marketers typically don't look at the different types of disgust.

Psychologists identify distinct kinds of disgust, each one stirring up a set of behavioral, physiological and psychological responses. Disgust may be physical, as in the reaction to rotten food or body fluids, or moral, like when we feel outraged by behaviors like racism or violence.

Some researchers distinguish types of disgust even further, linking them to feelings of threat to different parts of our social, moral and bodily safety.

According to our research, ideas that threaten a person’s self-concept can influence consumer behavior, albeit on a subconscious level. Our sense of self is quite stable over time, and we are motivated to maintain the factors that protect our sense of identity - things like control, self-esteem and a sense of belonging.

When something comes along to destabilize us, we’ll take steps to regain our psychological equilibrium.

The idea is that we feel threats to a particular aspect of ourselves, we try to boost ourselves back up. For example, let's say I've had a bad day at work that causes me to feel a threat to my sense of status or power. I want to feel better about myself, so one thing I can do is to purchase or display products that are symbolic of status or power, such as luxury products.

That temporarily boosts my sense of self, although I don’t necessarily notice it consciously.

The same urge to regulate our sense of self comes into play when a disgusting or distressing image enters our consciousness. When people see incidences of physical disgust, it threatens their sense of personal control and power. And one of the ways they can re-establish it is through their consumption.

We ran eight experiments to explore how respondents altered their behavior after looking at disgust-eliciting stimuli in both lab-based and online studies.

We predicted that morally disgusting stimuli would create a feeling of disruption to shared moral standards and reduced feelings of belongingness. This would lead to behaviors that could restore belongingness and relationships - such as donating to charity or helping others.

In contrast, physically disgusting stimuli were expected to threaten a person’s sense of power and control. That would result in compensatory consumption behavior to restore feelings of power, like engaging in conspicuous status consumption.

And these predictions were confirmed.

Compared to a control group, the participants exposed to moral disgust showed a significant tendency toward donating more to charities and helping others. The physical disgust group, by contrast, preferred larger brand logos and other signifiers of conspicuous consumption.

A disgusting image makes you feel bad, and you don't know exactly what it is about it that makes you feel bad. But through these kinds of experiments, we can determine which aspect of the self is threatened by a particular disgusting image. It turns out that different types of disgust have qualitatively different effects on the self-concept.

There isn’t a strong causal relationship between types of shockvertising material and consumer responses - it isn’t a case of pulling a lever and getting a predictable result. But there are subtle effects that marketers need to think about.

From a managerial viewpoint, I tell people: pay attention to the effects these disgusting images actually have. Apart from grabbing attention, eliciting extreme emotions, and so forth, they may have other effects on the self-concept that may work for the market or may not necessarily be desirable.

Applications

For marketers, the research shows that strong images should be selected carefully, depending on the type of behavior the publishers hope to trigger. The research also highlights that strong and emotive content may have behavioral effects that have not yet been discovered. Therefore, strong or disgusting images should generally be used with caution.

Methodology

Eight studies were carried out using in-person and online testing environments. The participants were exposed to written, graphic, and video-based stimuli designed to generate either disgust reactions or neutral responses. Later, the participants completed a second study where their behavior was assessed for compensatory or pro-social, helping activity. A meta-analysis was then carried out on the collected results.

Find out more

The Conversation France (in French): "Quand la pub choque : le dégoût est-il une stratégie marketing efficace ?"