Donate Positive & Negative Right for Charity

Marketers soliciting charitable contributions via emotional appeals need to determine the optimal blend of positive and negative in campaigns. How much to show smiling children and a message of gratitude for the positive impact of past contributions? How much to show sad children alongside a message that failure to contribute endangers lives of kids like these? Which objectives are best achieved with text saying that the healthy animals or lush landscapes shown in the photos are due to donations from people similar to the person viewing the solicitation? And which objectives are best achieved by text saying that the dead animals and damaged landscapes shown are because people failed to step up to help?
     Researchers at Complutense University of Madrid used such materials to evaluate study participants’ reactions. The study is distinctive and the conclusions more trustworthy because in addition to the behavioral measures of willingness to donate, neuropsychological data were gathered. Analyses of participants’ eye movements and their brain waves—electroencephalogram tracings—were interpreted to assess the attention paid to the solicitations and the impacts on emotional arousal from the solicitations.
     The overall conclusions provide guidance for when to use each type of appeal. Employ a negative appeal when your main objective is to increase donations in the short term. Those solicited will contribute in an effort to ease their negative feelings stimulated by the ad. But if your main objective is to engage the person for the longer-term, such as to enroll in monthly giving, use a positive appeal.
     The results also have implications for placement of emotion-arousing stimuli in the images and text of a printed solicitation: People spend more time exploring the text area when the ad is positively-toned and more time exploring the image area when the ad is negatively-toned.
     Generally, the positivity of an attractive solicitor will increase contributions. But a University of Alberta study found an exception to that rule. The researchers set up a set of fictitious websites on which visitors were asked to financially sponsor a child from a developing country.
     When the children were portrayed as having severe needs, facial attractiveness made no difference in the willingness to help. But when the level of need was not severe, people demonstrated less compassion for attractive than for unattractive children. The researchers attribute this effect to people assuming that attractive children would be better able to recruit help on their own.

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Profit Your Nonprofit by Arousing Gratitude 

Consider Karma in Contributions

Foment FOMO & Fear for Crypto Crazy

What persuades people to invest in cryptocurrencies, given the level of financial risk with even the most stable alternatives? In describing the popularity of cryptos, researchers at Universitat Ramon Llull note that financially vulnerable minorities are overrepresented among the range of investors. Therefore, perhaps the appeal is related to that of lotteries: The poor are drawn to dreams of cashing in big while ignoring the odds of crashing down big.
     Those researchers then go on to explore the power of FOMO. People’s caution about cryptos is dissolved by a fear of missing out on the astounding financial gains they believe others are achieving. For one of the studies, the researchers used as participants people who had recently invested in cryptos. The participants were asked to pretend they were considering another crypto investment. Some then read, “Other users, traders, and investors have posted comments and videos on this social media platform about the release of this crypto. They have commended the hype about this new crypto and how profitable it might be. So, you think you are missing out if you do not invest.” The others read, instead, “Other users, traders and investors have not mentioned anything about this crypto and have not shown any interest on this social media platform. So, you are not sure about the hype of this crypto and its profitability. You do not think you are missing out on anything if you finally decide not to invest.”
     As the researchers predicted, the fear of missing out resulted in higher agreement with, “It’s very likely that I will invest in this new crypto.” Additional studies in the set supported the conclusion that FOMO precipitated the investment interest and that this worked even when the investor had experienced prior losses. The implication is that sales of highly risky instruments can be increased with use of a FOMO appeal.
     However, consumer advocates and ethical financial advisors will want to curb financially vulnerable consumers’ attraction to crypto. The researchers found evidence that a fear message can counteract the FOMO effect. The text used in the study was, “9 out of 10 investors suffer severe losses when investing in crypto.”
     A separate project found the driving force of FOMO toward cryptocurrency investing is more likely in people who show high interpersonal agreeableness and low self-confidence. When a financial advisor identifies these characteristics in a consumer, delivering fear messages is especially important.

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Dissect the Shopper’s Risk Tolerance 

Launch Items Which Arouse Competitiveness 

Stick It to Some Shoppers

Green Up Your Corporate Social Responsibility

Offering products designed with sensitivity to environmental welfare—green products—improves the attractiveness of a store carrying them. A University of Indiana analysis of 75 green product introductions finds that this doesn’t uniformly equate to more buying of the products, though. Increased profitability often comes from purchases of items not carrying the green designation. In fact, the presence of socially conscious products makes it more likely the customer will buy products that do not embody social consciousness. It’s as if having chosen the store is enough to satisfy the shopper’s desire to display green values.
     By comparison, when a brand designs its corporate social responsibility programs to benefit environmental welfare, the positive emotion among consumers results in increased purchases of the related products.
     For their analyses, researchers at Imperial College London and University of Southern California sorted CSR initiatives into three categories—targeted to fair labor practices, such as contributing resources for the betterment of its employees; targeted to community philanthropy, such as making donations to nonprofit organizations; and targeted to environmental sustainability, such as supporting the welfare of nature.
     Participants in the set of studies were each provided a description of a wine brand, hand soap brand, or stationary paper brand which engaged in one of the three types of CSR initiative, or in no CSR initiative. Each participant was also invited to purchase the described product, using a portion of money given to all as a stipend for study participation.
     Compared to those people not told of the brand’s CSR initiative, those told of an environmental CSR were more likely to spend their money purchasing the product. This was not generally true when the CSR initiative was described as targeted to employee welfare or community philanthropy.
     Further aspects of the studies identified the explanation for the effect as moral elevation, a characteristic measured by high degree of agreement with statements such as “The brand moves me because of the ideas it represents” and “The brand makes me want to be a better person.” CSR efforts targeted to environmental welfare generated greater moral elevation, and the moral elevation resulted in higher sales of the associated products.
     In the marketplace, shoppers will look for evidence beyond the CSR programs to judge the true values of a brand. Still, the general truth is that enabling shoppers to feel good about themselves improves sales, and environmentally-targeted CSR helps with that.

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Wash Away Your Greenwash Products 

Apologize via Corporate Social Responsibility

Couple Fiscal Intercourse

Marketers benefit when shoppers have money skills. The shoppers will be better able to pay their bills and so have funds to spend with you. Building those skills should begin early. As part of your community outreach, encourage parents to include their kids in financial literacy talk.
     A set of studies at Indiana University, University of Michigan, Yale University, and Northwestern University indicates that as those kids approach marriage age, the talk should include encouragement of husband and wife setting up joint rather than separate banking accounts at the start. During the first two years of marriage, couples who established joint accounts had a stronger relationship quality than did couples with separate accounts.
     The researchers attribute this to the partners with joint accounts engaging in more interpersonal dialogues about financial goals and more monitoring of each other’s spending habits. With joint accounts, each partner is thinking how they’ll justify large purchases to their mate. Regularly discussing expenditures and plans for expenditures with each other leads to insights about the important values each partner maintains—a valuable contributor to an enduring relationship.
     Couples often aim to balance their shopping tendencies. Tightwads—who recognize they should be more willing to spend money—tend to marry spendthrifts—who recognize they should be more cautious in spending. They married each other to help moderate the extremes. Joint accounts assist with this.
     The study of joint-versus-separate-accounts is notable because of the implications for the strength of marriages. It’s also notable because of the research methodology. In choosing a two-year tracking time, the researchers report that this span has been considered in prior studies as foreshadowing marital fate. 
     The research methodology also resolves causation direction. We might argue that couples who decide on their own to set up joint accounts already have a stronger relationship than do couples who decide to set up separate accounts at the start. So it’s not that joint accounts cause stronger relationships. It’s that relationship strength causes joint accounts. Or maybe it’s just that the two are correlated, caused by some other factor.
     The researchers addressed this by randomly assigning some of the couples in the study to set up joint accounts and others to set up individual accounts. When the researchers then assessed marriage relationship strength at six points over the first two years of the marriage, they could legitimately attribute the observed differences to the effects of the account type.

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Include the Kids in Financial Literacy Talk 

Couple Wise Consumer Decisions 

Note Influence in Nontraditional Couples