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Research Question When marketing prosocial products, notably "green" products, how best to frame the promotional message? Past work suggests that, for promotions involving prosocial products, marketers must suitably balance egoistic versus altruistic reasons. This however begs the question whether marketers must use appeals that appeal to enhancing consumers' own self-image and ego, or appeals that appeal to consumers' desire to enhance the wellbeing of others, or both. Further, individual differences relating to environmental consciousness moderate the above result, impacting whether marketers should use egoistic appeals or altruistic appeals. The above work contributes to the work on "green marketing," an emerging but important product category, identifying how marketers can best promote such products. The above work more generally contributes to work on whether more number of reasons is always more persuasive, and simultaneously extends and counters extant findings on work relating to balancing egoistic versus altruistic appeals Method and Data We report results of two behavioral laboratory studies using over 336 undergraduate participants. In study 1, we used an ANOVA to examine the differences in purchase intentions and product attitude for different appeal types. We also used the PROCESS model 6 to find support for the proposed serial mediation model of: appeal type--single (altruistic or egoistic) or mixed (combination of altruistic and egoistic) messages → persuasion awareness → psychological reactance → purchase intentions and product attitude. In study 2, we use PROCESS model 2 to examine if the differences in environmental consciousness (measured using Green Values Scale) moderated the impact of appeal-type (egoistic appeals vs. altruistic appeals) on purchase intentions. Summary of Findings Results from Study1 show that mixing altruistic and egoistic reasons yield lower purchase intentions and unfavorable product attitude compared to when egoistic or altruistic messages are presented alone. Further results of serial mediation show that mixing egoistic and altruistic reason increases participant's awareness of the persuasive intent of the appeal, which in turn stimulates psychological reactance and thus diminishes intentions and attitudes. Results from Study 2 suggest that high EC consumers have higher purchase intentions when the persuasive message consists of prosocial reasons. On the other hand low EC consumers have higher purchase intentions when the message is framed using selfish reasons. Key Contributions This paper contributes to the literatures on green marketing. Given the importance of the green marketing domain, researchers have examined how best to structure advertising appeals. First, when marketing green products, this paper suggests that marketers are generally better off not using mixed appeals, i.e. a mix of egoistic appeals and altruistic appeals, as there is no condition wherein this is optimal. Second, marketers must choose between using only a set of egoistic appeals or only a set of altruistic appeals. When targeting more environmentally conscious consumers, marketers are relatively better off using a set of altruistic appeals; when targeting less environmentally conscious consumers, marketers are relatively better off using a set of egoistic appeals. Third, past work has shown that environmentally conscious consumers are more likely to buy green products; this work shows that this is more likely to be the case if marketers use altruistic appeals. However, if marketers use egoistic appeals in their advertising, then purchase of green products may be relatively less impacted by levels of environmental consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research Question Lately, there have been many new products on the market that are fortified with extra vitamins and minerals. Originally, fortifying foods was done in order to address nutritional deficiencies. Recently, consumers have been more concerned about the health benefits of the foods they buy, are willing to pay more for healthy foods, and are interested in fortified foods (Nielsen 2015). The food industry responded to the public 's new attention to the health benefits of fortified products and has started to market many foods with added vitamins and minerals that are beyond what the product needs to combat a nutritional deficiency. We describe these foods as ultra-functional foods. This paper examines the influence of advertising an ultrafunctional product compared to a regular product. More specifically we contrast consumers' evaluations of ultrafunctional healthy offerings (e.g. vitamin enriched milk) versus ultra-functional unhealthy offerings (e.g. vitamin enriched cola). We propose that for the healthy product, the ultra-functional message will have the greatest positive influence on attitudes and purchase intentions compared to the unhealthy product. However addition of a health prevention message will increase attitudes, intentions, and put more focus on health goals for the unhealthy ultra-functional cola product compared to the healthy milk product. Method and Data We report results of two behavioral studies using over 300 MTurk participants. In study 1, we used moderation analyses to examine if differences in ultra-functional claim (ultra-functional product vs. regular product) moderated difference in attitudes and intentions across the different product types (healthy milk product vs. unhealthy cola product). In study 2, we used mediated moderation analyses to examine if differences in ultra-functional message claim (ultra-functional product vs. ultra-functional product with prevention message) moderated differences in preferences across the healthy product vs. the unhealthy product. Using PROCESS, we also show that this moderation is mediated by product health perceptions. Summary of Findings Consistent with our hypothesis, we found that for healthy products fortification increases attitudes and purchase intentions. Also, there was a less of an effect of the ultra-functional claim for the unhealthy product. For an unhealthy ultra-functional product a health prevention message in an advertisement will have a positive influence on attitudes, intentions and put more focus on health goals compared to an advertisement that does not include a health prevention message. There was a little effect of health prevention message on the healthy ultra-functional product. We predicted these effects because the addition of the health message increased healthiness perceptions and this was supported by the finding that product health perceptions mediated the moderating effect of the interaction. Key Contributions This is the first paper that provides a detailed examination of how consumers evaluate fortification of the healthy product compared to fortification of the unhealthy product. These results have implications for theory, marketers and public policy makers. Interestingly, adding additional nutrients and minerals to an unhealthy product did not increase attitudes and purchase intentions for this type of product. This is potentially good news for those concerned that advertising additional nutrients and minerals may positively influence attitudes and intentions. On the other hand, when a health message was included in the advertisement for the ultrafunctional, but unhealthy product, this addition of the health message increased attitudes and intentions, which lead to a call for policy makers to help refine what types of health messages, can be included on products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An abstract of the article "Investigating the Pleasures of Sin: The Contingent Role of Telic Personality Disposition on Consumers' Evaluations of Vice and Virtue Product Offerings" by Swati Verma and colleagues is presented.