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Experiments on the effectiveness of marketing communications tactics to support ‘unappealing’ animals

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conference contribution
posted on 2019-06-21, 08:57 authored by Jie MengJie Meng, E. Cooper, Y. Sun
This study was designed for investigating how effective different marketing communications tactics are at influencing donations to animal conservation campaigns featuring ‘unappealing’ (non-flagship) species. Experiments were executed to evaluate the effectiveness of celebrity endorsements, anthropomorphism, message framing, and personal incentives in fictitious animal conservation adverts. Results showed that urgent message tone was not successful at gaining support for non-flagship campaigns but combining anthropomorphism with positive message did increase support for nonflagship causes. Celebrity endorsements were shown to be successful at influencing willingness to donate, provided that the celebrity is highly credible in the world of animal conservation. Offering personal incentives to influence donations achieved its purpose when used in campaigns featuring ‘popular’ animals, but it was not a successful marketing tactic when used to promote ‘undesirable’ animals. Interestingly, the results revealed that participants were strongly influenced to donate to a non-flagship campaign when they believed that it would result in wider environmental benefits that would also be beneficial to humans. Overall, a participant’s prior knowledge or preference for a specific species had a great influence over donation choice. However, this study has revealed that through effective marketing participants can be swayed to support ‘undesirable’ animals instead of typically ‘preferred’ species

History

School

  • Loughborough University London

Published in

48th EMAC Annual Conference

Citation

MENG, J., COOPER, E. and SUN, Y., 2019. Experiments on the effectiveness of marketing communications tactics to support ‘unappealing’ animals. Presented at the 48th EMAC Annual Conference, Hamburg, May 28-31st.

Publisher

European Marketing Academy (EMAC)

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2019-04-04

Publication date

2019

Notes

This is a conference paper.

ISBN

9783982114606

Language

  • en

Location

Hamburg

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