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This study aims to examine the different effects that the fear and humor appeals in anti-smoking advertisements for children have on their affective reactions to the advertisements, on their beliefs about smoking and on their behavioral intentions to smoke.

This paper presents the findings of a qualitative research study conducted in Italy with children aged from 8 to 11 years.

The results indicated that the humor appeal is a useful method for conveying a social theme in a pleasant way and creating a likable character that becomes an example for children to imitate; however, it is necessary to employ the fear appeal to make children reflect carefully about the negative consequences of smoking.

This study examined only children's behavioral intentions derived from anti-smoking advertisements, but future research should also examine their real behaviors after a period following repeated viewing of public service announcements about smoking prevention or other social issues.

Understanding how different types of appeals can influence children represents an important result for the prevention of youth smoking and the promotion of healthy lifestyle habits during childhood.

Understanding how different types of appeals can influence children represents an important result for the prevention of youth smoking and the promotion of healthy lifestyle habits during childhood.

Few studies have examined the impact of social advertisements on children, and particularly little is known about the effectiveness of fear appeals on this group.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the application of advertising variation and repetition strategies in the context of communicating about social issues in least developed countries (LDCs).

Study 1 used a between-subjects experimental study using 106 students which were exposed to either the varied advertising condition (a negative appeal followed by a positive appeal or vice versa) or repetition condition (two negative appeals). In Study 2, a total of 111 students from Tilburg University and 95 students from Addis Ababa University participated in the study. A random ordering of experimental envelopes assigned the students to one of the following message order conditions (negative appeal–positive appeal, negative appeal–negative appeal, positive appeal–positive appeal and positive appeal–negative appeal).

Study 1 shows that for many social issues, an advertising variation strategy (a negative appeal followed by a positive appeal) is more effective than an advertising repetition strategy (two negative appeals) in terms of recall. Study 2 builds on these findings by differentiating between taboo and non-taboo issues. This distinction is important because many social issues, such as HIV, domestic violence and child abuse, for instance, are taboo in LDCs. Interestingly, the findings of Study 1 are reproduced for non-taboo issues but not for taboo issues. If an issue is a conversational taboo in a certain culture, then an advertising repetition strategy that only uses positive appeals is more effective than an advertising variation strategy.

The use of students as participants may be a limitation of both studies. Because the reactions of students to specific message appeals may be age-related, concerns regarding the generalizability of the findings are justified.

Overall, the results of this paper provide useful information to social advertisers on when and how to use different types of advertising strategies in LDCs.

High dispositional optimism is often associated with people engaging in behaviour that has adverse effects on their health such as smoking. This study aims to investigate people’s intention to adopt preventive health behaviour by observing the effectiveness of anti-smoking ads during the ongoing coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

Two studies have been carried out, first with a UK sample and second with the US sample. The studies examined the effectiveness of anti-smoking ad (appeal: high fear vs low fear), smoking behaviour elicited perception of vulnerability to COVID-19 and dispositional optimism on lowering people’s urge to smoke.

The study findings revealed a high fear appeal ad is more effective in lowering people’s urge to smoke. However, this association is significantly mediated by perception of vulnerability to COVID-19. Further, high dispositional optimism was found to moderate the effect of the anti-smoking ad on the perception of vulnerability to COVID-19, although a comparatively smaller effect was observed for the UK sample. Finally, high dispositional optimism significantly moderated the mediation of vulnerability to COVID-19 on lower urge to smoke only for the US sample.

The study highlights a need for a greater collaborative effort by the public, government, firms in the business of nicotine replacement solutions, socially responsible cigarette and tobacco manufacturing firms and health agencies that may lead to increased preventive health behaviour during the ongoing pandemic.

This paper aims to investigate the level of fear experienced by students aged 13 to 30 years, in response to different types of anti‐smoking fear appeals. It seeks to extend and validate Quinn et al.'s study by specifically comparing adolescent and young adult responses to fear appeals.

A total of 548 useable questionnaires were collected via a self‐administered questionnaire based on established scales. Factor analysis, T tests and ANOVA were used to replicate Quinn et al.'s analysis of the data.

The main results are consistent with previous findings that adolescents and non‐smokers experience more fear. Further, general health and factual appeals cause the most fear across all ages but adolescents were more fearful of factual appeals and social ostracism appeals than young adults possibly indicating that factual and social appeals are better targeted at adolescents than young adults. The results were broadly similar to Quinn et al.'s results.

Advertisers often use realistic fear appeals to attract the attention of the intended recipient, to scare the recipient into processing the information, and to get them to act in response to the anti‐smoking message. However, because adolescents and nonsmokers experience more fear, social marketers, governments, schools and parents need to customise fear appeals to suit these recipients.

The current study re‐tests and revalidates the effect of these different appeal types amongst adolescents and young adults. The results will help clarify which type of fear appeal causes more fear amongst adolescents and young adults in Australia, 20 years on from Quinn et al.'s study.

This paper aims to investigate the situational and personal aspects that may trigger smokers’ psychological state reactance. It was hypothesized that situational factors, such as perceived threat to freedom and perceived loss of control, which are supposed to be triggered by an anti-smoking persuasive message, and a personality pattern, such as trait reactance proneness, predict the psychological state reactance.

An experiment and a survey were conducted on a random sample of 246 smoking undergraduate students in two Tunisian business schools. Four anti-smoking print ads, with two different levels of negative emotional intensity, were manipulated.

The findings depict the importance of the anti-smoking ads with a high negative emotional intensity, the perceived threat to freedom and trait reactance proneness in the smokers’ psychological reactance prediction.

This work seems to be important to the extent that few works have combined situational and dispositional factors to explain the smokers’ psychological reactance. The findings in this paper seem interesting insofar as they show the importance of the personality factor and the fear appeal in triggering smokers’ anger and negative cognitions that lead, in turn, to the arousal of psychological reactance. This paper should be of interest to readers in the areas of health communication, social psychology and social marketing.

Tobacco smoking will kill literally millions of people annually around the world. Despite this fact, prevalence among young people remains unacceptably high. Because tobacco is so addictive, the typical adolescent smoker can look forward to a lifetime addiction, reduced quality of life and premature death. A long‐term solution to this problem must include action to postpone or inhibit adolescents from taking up smoking. Advertising research indicates that a message is more effective if the target audience experiences a feeling of involvement in it. It must also communicate new, important information that engages the audience at a cognitive and affective level and is readily verifiable against the audience’s own experience. It follows that the threat of addiction should be used as the key message in a campaign to reduce the incidence of adolescent cigarette smoking. This threat is potentially salient for adolescents. It is concrete and immediate, not merely a promise of increased statistical probabilities 30 or more years into the future. It is also readily verifiable from the adolescent’s own experience. It may also be worth focusing on other consequent losses that flow from the addiction.

The overall objective of this research is to “explore whether shock advertising has a long-lasting positive effect on the smoking cessation among smoking Jordanians in a country where smoking is a deep-rooted social norm.”

This research is an exploratory qualitative research. A purposeful sampling technique was used to select participants from a mall intercept and randomly divided into groups of seven. Each group was interviewed in two different focus group sessions (four weeks apart). All focus groups were audio-recorded, transcribed and analyzed using thematic analysis.

A total of 41 participants took part in the focus group session. Most participants were smokers or second-hand smokers. “Three overarching themes were generated from the focus groups: previous anti-smoking campaign experience, shock advertising (SA) impact and drawbacks of SA. All participants reported that they have never been exposed to shocking adverts, and the shock appeal has never been applied in any of the anti-smoking or health awareness campaigns in Jordan. This research revealed that incorporating images of children with a mixture of emotional and fear appeals is effective in targeting Jordanian parents' negative consumptive behaviors, which may harm other individuals, especially children. Moreover, most participants commented that the effects of shock adverts would be very short term and would not likely change behaviors”.

This research contributes both “theoretically and practically to the value and effectiveness of shock advertising. This research area is overlooked in MENA countries, particularly Jordan”.

The purpose of this paper is to present an overview and evaluation of the European Commission “HELP – for a life without tobacco” campaign.

Data collected via a web and a telephone survey is used to evaluate the campaign.

The findings reveal how a campaign targeted at individuals can lead to social change through involvement with key stakeholder groups including NGO's and the public at large. At an individual level the campaign was received favourably with overall high levels of awareness and engagement with the message. The associated web site was thought to contain trustworthy information and persuasive arguments about the dangers of smoking and passive smoking.

The originality of this paper lies in providing an example of social advertising across a large number of countries. Furthermore, this case study adds to the literature on demarketing, highlighting that demarketing can take place across two levels both at the citizen level and at the governmental level.

Whereas much previous research focuses on the ways consumers strive to gain social approval, consumption that may result in social disapproval must be considered. In order to do so, the purpose of this paper is to explore consumers' self‐concepts within a risky consumption context, namely smoking. Self‐concept discrepancies and the resulting emotions and coping strategies are identified.

A qualitative methodology based on 30 focus groups conducted across ten European countries is employed.

Findings demonstrate self‐concept discrepancies between both the actual self and ought/ideal guiding end states, as well as between the “I” and social selves. Such discrepancies generate negative emotions and result in emotion‐focused coping strategies. In addition, the accuracy of smokers' social self‐concepts with reference to the actual perceptions of non‐smokers is discussed.

Important implications for the design of effective anti‐smoking advertising are discussed, based on the findings. It is suggested that counter advertising should encourage dialogue between smokers and non‐smokers and that message themes should centre on building the self‐efficacy of smokers.

The reason why the social context should be an integral part of consumer self‐concept research is highlighted. Moreover, the importance of moving beyond merely understanding the existence of self‐discrepancies, to focus on the emotions that are generated by these discrepancies and the consequent coping strategies employed to resolve them is identified. As such, the potential contributions that may arise by recognising the intersection between two bodies of literature that are often treated separately, namely, consumer coping and the self‐concept, are highlighted.

In 2005, the European Union launched a four‐year antismoking television advertising campaign across its 25 Member States. This study aims to evaluate the second and third years (2006 and 2007) of the campaign based on telephone interviews with over 24,000 consumers (smokers, non‐smokers, and ex‐smokers).

The study focuses on smokers and examines the potential for using segmentation and targeting in informing the campaign. Three important factors are used to identify clusters: attitude toward the campaign; comprehension of the campaign; and inclination to think responsibly about their smoking behaviour.

Cluster analyses identify three distinct and significant target groups (message‐involved, message‐indifferent, and message‐distanced) who respond differentially to the advertising. Furthermore, the percentage of respondents within each cluster varies across the EU Member States. Using Schwartz's cultural framework, the cultural dimension of “openness to change versus conservatism” is found to explain substantial cross‐national variation in message‐involved and messaged‐distanced respondents.

Cluster solutions are shown to be stable across the two data waves. Implications of these results are discussed.

This is the first study that seeks to better understand consumer reactions to social‐marketing advertising across different segments of the overall target group.