Do Sad-Looking Endorsers Indeed Work Better in Charity Advertising? The Relevance of Consumers’ Brand Awareness and Empathy: An Abstract

Abstract

While social causes have increased during the last decade, charity organizations experience lower donation volumes, and, thus, needed to realize the potential of online advertising to increase donations (Silverman, 2017). With the rising number of social causes, public policy needs to increase social well-being. Online advertising’s relevance has tremendously gained importance over the last years in charity advertising as well, but not enough is known about its specific success factors (Bart et al., 2014). Sad emotion displays in ads affect consumers’ donation intentions and emotions in a way that evokes recipients’ empathy (Small & Verrochi, 2009), which influences subsequent responses such as the increased likelihood of helping others (Bagozzi & Moore, 1994; Small & Verrochi, 2009). However, other charity marketing research reports smiling endorsers, for instance, when combined with a sad ad copy (Septianto & Paramita, 2021) or when ad recipients are highly involved (Cao & Jia, 2017), to be more efficient for charity advertising success. Additionally, previous studies propose that brand awareness (Mac Donald & Sharp, 2003) is important for positive consumer responses (Konecnik & Gartner, 2007; Van den Bergh & Vrana, 1998) such as higher donation amounts or intentions. This study intends to answer the question of whether emotion displays in online charity ads versus brand awareness of the charity organization equally have the potential to increase positive consumer responses and if there is a potential interaction of these drivers.

To test the proposed relationships a one factorial between-subjects design was used, manipulating endorser’s emotion display (sad vs. smiling) but keeping the ad copy and the logo constant. Participants were told that they came across this online ad (exposure time 15 s) while surfing on the Internet. All constructs were measured with items adapted from the literature.

Results (n = 346, 62.70% female, average age 30.11) show that a sad looking endorser leads to more positive consumer responses in terms of intentions to click on the ad, WOM and donation intention than a smiling endorser. Testing for the mediating effect, endorser’s emotion display (sad vs. smiling) does not influence consumers’ empathy, which, however, has a highly significant effect on all marketing success metrics. Consumer brand awareness is a significant driver of consumers’ empathy, which in turn has a positive impact on consumers’ intentions to click on the ad and donation intention. Consumers’ brand awareness also negatively moderates the effect of endorser’s emotion display on consumers’ empathy. Findings of this study are highly relevant for charity marketing and public policy management to fight against the declining donation volumes by focusing on target group-specific advertisements and making society aware of topics such as poverty.