INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN THE PROCESSING OF NEGATIVE ADVERTISING INFORMATION: TOLERANCE OF NEGATIVITY

摘要

Prior studies have looked at the effects of negative public relations information (cf, Ahluwalia, Burnkrant, and Unnava 2000), negative word-of-mouth communication (cf., Laczniak, DeCarlo, and Ramaswami 2001), and negatively framed comparative advertising (Sorescu and Gelb 2000) on consumer reactions. Yet, after more than a decade, research dealing with negative marketplace information has yet to come to an agreement on how consumers respond to it (Muehling, Laczniak, and Ehrich 2013; Shiv, Britton, and Payne 2004). Since individuals' preferences for certain types of information content have been found to influence processing of other types of ad information (e.g., verbal versus pictorial presentations - Childers, Houston, and Heckler 1985), it is likely that a similar type of individual difference factor will be driving how receivers deal with negatively versus positively framed advertising information. The present manuscript proposes that such an individual difference variable - tolerance of negativity (TON) - can aid researchers as they attempt to understand how consumers will respond to negative advertising information in the marketplace. It is based on the belief that consumers will differ in their receptivity of negative advertising information and is defined as the capacity to endure negative advertising information without experiencing any adverse effects. Here, negative information stands for any language which is offensive, objectionable, or puts down a competitor's brand, and adverse effects refer to the negative emotions (i.e., anger, contempt etc.) that a receiver is likely to experience if the negativity crossed their tolerance threshold.