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,” says Shrum. “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 there could be a lot more to it than meets the eye.
Disgust is not a single emotion
Shrum and Fumagalli 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,” says Shrum.
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.
How disgust steers us toward subconscious spending
According to the team’s 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” Shrum explains. “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, it seems. “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.”
Different kinds of disgust, different spending decisions
Shrum’s research explored how respondents altered their behavior after looking at disgust-eliciting stimuli in lab-based and online studies.
Based on previous research, the prediction was that morally disgusting stimuli would create a feeling of disruption to shared moral standards and reduced feelings of belongingness, resulting in behavior that could restore belongingness and relationships – such as donating to charity or helping others. In contrast, physically disgusting stimuli were predicted to threaten a person’s sense of power and control , resulting in compensatory consumption behavior to restore feelings of power, such as engaging in conspicuous status consumption. And these predictions were confirmed across eight experiments. Compared to a control group (neutral stimuli), the study participants who were exposed to the moral disgust stimuli showed a significant tendency towards donating more to charities and helping others in a later study. For the physical disgust stimuli group, the trend was towards preferring 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,” says Shrum.
It turns out that different types of disgust have qualitatively different effects on the self-concept.
A subtle effect
Shrum emphasizes that 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. Rather, there may be additional subtle effects for marketers to bear in mind when they employ shockvertising tactics that grab attention.
“From a managerial viewpoint, we are saying, 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,” he concludes.
Apart from grabbing attention and eliciting extreme emotions, disgusting images may have other effects on the self-concept that may work for the market or not.
