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This study aims to extend the literature on marketing communications by exploring the effect of placing products in humorous scenes. It aims to ascertain the prevalence of placement scenes associated with humor in television programs and the effect of humor on brand persuasiveness.

The study used a two-phase research process. A content analysis of prime-time television programing was conducted to map the relative prevalence of brands placed in humorous contexts and for the selection of research stimuli. This was followed by a large-scale experimental study of 1,100 television viewers in Hong Kong with real stimuli that had been digitally manipulated.

The study found that a humorous context did enhance recall of placed brands but its effect on brand attitudes was mediated by audience involvement in the viewing and moderated by psychological trait reactance. Interestingly, and in contrast to conventional advertising, placing brands in a humorous context led to lower involvement in the viewing, which, in turn, resulted in lower brand attitudes. Individuals with low trait reactance were more positive toward brands placed in a non-humorous context than individuals with high trait reactance while individuals with high trait reactance were more positive toward brands placed in a humorous context, though the difference was less prominent.

The findings help to illustrate when and how a humorous context contributes to the recall of and attitudes toward placed brands.

The results also facilitate marketers and program producers to choose the best placement context and design more effective placement strategies.

This research is the first to empirically examine the effect of a humorous context on the unaided recall of and attitudes toward brands placed in television programs.

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.

As a frequently observed business phenomenon, the use of product scarcity to improve a product’s market performance has received increasing attention from both academics and practitioners. The resulting literature has covered a wide variety of issues based on various theories, using different research methods, in a diverse range of settings. However, this diversity also makes it difficult to grasp the core themes and findings, and to see the outstanding knowledge gaps. This paper aims to review previous studies on the use of product scarcity in marketing and identifies new directions for future research.

A systematic review was conducted to identify and analyse 66 research papers published in business and management journals between 1970 and 2017.

The authors examined the underlying theories of scarcity-based marketing, and developed a conceptual framework that describes the key factors of product scarcity and how they influence both consumers and the market. They also highlighted some key achievements in modelling the processes involved in using product scarcity in marketing.

This analysis of the identified papers suggests that there are substantial gaps in our knowledge of this field, which opens up new paths for future research. For future research, the authors identified three directions aimed at: addressing the practical needs of firms in understanding product scarcity; guiding the implementation of scarcity-based strategies; and measuring, monitoring and predicting the level of product scarcity and its impacts during implementation.

Online trolling is a detrimental behavior for consumers and service businesses. Although online trolling research is steadily increasing, service research has yet to thoroughly explore how this behavior impacts businesses. Further, the role of bystanders, consumers who witness a victim (business) being trolled, remains largely unexplored. The purpose of this paper is thus to introduce online trolling to the service literature and begin to identify when (types of online troll content) and why (empathy and psychological reactance) bystanders are likely to intervene and support a service business being trolled by posting positive eWOM.

This research uses a two-study (Study 1 n = 313; Study 2 n = 472) experimental design with scenarios of a service business experiencing online trolling (moral versus sadistic). Participants' responses as bystanders were collected via an online survey.

Results reveal bystanders are more likely to post positive eWOM to support a service organization experiencing sadistic trolling. Psychological reactance is shown to mediate the relationship between trolling type and positive eWOM. Further, spotlight analysis demonstrates that bystanders with higher levels of empathy are more likely to post positive eWOM, whereas bystanders with low levels of empathy are likely to have a significantly higher level of psychological reactance.

This research is among the first in the service literature to specifically explore the consumer misbehavior of online trolling. Further, it provides new perspectives to online trolling by probing the role of bystanders and when and why they are likely to support service organizations being trolled.

This paper aims to propose a framework for psychological reactance–triggered adverse effects of variety reductions in grocery product categories on shoppers’ patronage intentions.

The paper tests this framework in two field studies with European shoppers.

Participants perceived mild (let alone aggressive or conspicuous) variety reductions as a threat to their prior freedom of choice (i.e. a precondition for the occurrence of domain-specific reactance). Through lower satisfaction with the reduced variety and anger towards the grocer, this threat, in turn, fostered adverse patronage intentions. Such effects depended on product category nature (utilitarian vs hedonic) and shoppers’ intrinsic need for variety, attitude towards private-label items and general proclivity towards experiencing reactance.

By applying psychological reactance theory to a variety reduction context, this paper offers new implications for assortment reduction research. Certain limitations call for future reactance theory–framed inquiry.

The findings caution against traditional grocers’ drastic variety reduction policy and highlight conditions enabling assortment rationalisation without severely affecting freedom of choice.

Drawing on notions such as “the tyranny of choice”, critics have urged traditional grocers to drastically reduce variety. However, this paper shows that shoppers perceive variety reductions as threats to their prior freedom, which traditional grocers themselves educated them to expect and enjoy.

Reactance theory is applied to investigate consumer responses to “buy local” campaigns initiated by government to counteract the effects of an economic crisis, using the COVID-19 pandemic as an illustrative context.

A conceptual model is developed, aimed at revealing the extent to which “buy local” campaigns – explicitly justified by the need to fight an economic crisis – are likely to lead to (a) compliance (i.e. support for local products/retailers) or (b) freedom restoration (i.e. support for foreign products/retailers). The model is subsequently tested on samples of German (N = 265) and Italian (N = 268) consumers.

“Buy local” campaigns are likely to generate reactance amongst consumers and such reactance can lead to both non-compliance and, albeit less so, freedom restoration outcomes. At the same time, consumer ethnocentrism acts as a countervailing influence by attenuating the effects of generated reactance and its undesirable outcomes.

Psychological reactance theory offers a novel perspective for conceptually approaching the likely responses of consumers towards “buy local” campaigns and the empirical findings support the use of the theory in this context.

Policymakers seeking to encourage consumers to support the local economy during times of an economic crisis need to be aware that “buy local” campaigns may, against their intended communication goals, result in non-compliance as well as consumer responses in the opposite direction. Thus, the reactance-generating potential of such campaigns needs to be explicitly considered at the planning/implementation stage.

The findings confirm the relevance of reactance theory as a conceptual lens for studying the effects of “buy local” campaigns and have important implications for domestic/foreign firms as well as for policy makers seeking to encourage consumers to support the local economy during times of an economic crisis.

Although relationship marketing has developed into the prevailing marketing paradigm, it frequently encounters resistance from the demand side. Both management practitioners and academics indicate that at least some consumers show reactance against loyalty programs, i.e. against tactical instruments of relationship marketing. Nevertheless, relationship marketing has widely neglected reactance theory. This paper attempts to close this gap.

Based on the fundamental principles of loyalty programs and reactance theory the paper presents a set of hypotheses on the determinants and effects of situational consumer reactance against loyalty programs. It tests these hypotheses on the basis of 388 face‐to‐face interviews with bookstore customers. These interviews include a between‐subject manipulation on the reactance effect of economic, social‐psychological, and contractual bonding potentials. To test the proposed hypotheses, the paper applies structural equation modeling with PLS.

As expected, contractual bonds provoked reactance effects, while social‐psychological bonds neither increased reactance, nor the perceived utility of the program. Economic bonds raised perceived utility up to a certain threshold level, from which the reactance effect dominated thereafter.

As a consequence, a cautious and limited application of customer loyalty programs is advisable. The developed consumer reactance scale can help managers to evaluate the effects of planned or implemented customer retention measures.

This is the first attempt to investigate situational reactance in a loyalty program setting.

Technology upgrade has been adopted as a strategy for technology vendors to modify and improve their incumbent technologies. However, user resistance is widespread in practice. In order to understand user technology upgrade behavior, this study integrates the retrospective and prospective sides of actions and proposes an inertia-mindfulness ambidexterity perspective to explore the antecedents of technology upgrade.

An online survey was conducted to collect data from 520 Microsoft Windows users to test this research model. Structural equation modeling (SEM) approach was used to evaluate measurement model and structural model.

Inertia can induce individuals' psychological reactance and thus reduce their intention to upgrade. In contrast, mindfulness can decrease users' psychological reactance and then motivate them to upgrade to a new version of technology. Finally, individuals' dissatisfaction with the current version of technology would weaken the negative impact of psychological reactance on upgrade intention.

This study generates an inertia-mindfulness ambidexterity perspective to investigate the factors that influence user technology upgrade intention from both retrospective and prospective sides and then identifies psychological reactance as underlying mechanism to explain how inertia and mindfulness work. Finally, this study posits that user dissatisfaction with current version of technology can moderate the relationship between psychological reactance and technology upgrade intention.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how customers respond to a service provider’s invitation to share responsibility for the experience of an “impersonal” service that is not customized but available to all customers on an equal footing; specifically to assess the extent to which the tendency to psychological reactance moderates their responses.

Four studies investigate the effects of such invitations on perceptions of shared responsibility, the mechanism underlying that process, the effect of trait reactance on susceptibility to an invitation, and the extent to which a predisposition to reactance moderates the effect of an invitation on willingness to share blame for service failure.

Service customers are more likely to feel a sense of shared responsibility and less likely to experience reactance in response to a “reciprocal” invitation to participate in “co-creation” of the experience than to a more “unilateral” invitation. That heightened perception of shared responsibility was restricted to low-reactance individuals, who were also more willing to share the blame for service failure in response to a unilateral invitation and even more so when it was reciprocal. The willingness of high-reactance individuals was unaffected by the type of invitation.

Whereas the relevant literature has focussed mainly on person-to-person service transactions, the studies reported here show how customers may be converted into active partners in an “impersonal” service encounter.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the resistance to change in the organizational contexts where a soon‐to‐be‐implemented change initiative infringes upon freedoms of the employees. Specifically, the role of affect was explored within the framework of psychological reactance theory, delineating salience of affect as a driver of the intention to restore one's threatened freedoms. Additionally, the roles that emotional intelligence and interpersonal justice play in lowering the activation of reactance were examined.

This is a conceptual paper that connects self‐determination, reactance, organizational change, emotional intelligence and justice literatures to explain how psychological reactance may be energized and de‐energized in the context of on‐going organizational change.

The study suggests that organizational change is likely to undermine employees' freedoms, which will arouse negative affective states. The latter are likely to energize reactance – a motivational state directed to restore the threatened freedoms. Negative affect and reactance may be mitigated by implementing and sustaining socially supportive and interpersonally just organizational environment, led by an emotionally intelligent management staff.

This work is the first that investigates how and under what circumstances organizational change is likely to activate employees' psychological reactance. Furthermore, the study presents two new methods that may be used by managers to mitigate change‐driven reactance and the negative affect that energizes it.