Abstract
Social advertising is designed to have an impact on the behavior of the target audience to improve the welfare of both the individuals and the society. The challenge for social marketing is to respond to the exchange process in a social perspective, considering that non-profit actions are perceived as intangible since they deal with services. As donations, the neuroscience applied to consumer behavior is an added value since it offers elements explaining the reactions of the individuals to emotional contents. Understanding the emotions in the moment in which they are felt allows to understand the experimentation of a message by individuals and to understand the possibility that the message can change the behavior of the target audience. The aim of the study is to assess the effectiveness of the Unicef bequest campaign in terms of emotional response, comparing different creative proposals to optimize communication, applying neuromarketing tools to the social area. The experiment involved 70 participants (35 males; 35 females; mean age 68.94 years) and compared two different spots and flyers. The progeny factor was introduced to assess the different impacts of bequests depending on the presence or absence of potential heirs. The neuromarketing tools such as electroencephalography (EEG), skin conductance (SC), and eye-tracker were used for instrumentation purposes. Analysis of the two spots showed statistically significant differences in both the Approach–Withdrawal Index (AWI), for the cognitive involvement, and the SC, the emotional activation indicator, particularly for those not having children (target audience) and in a specific spot that linked the possibility to live after death. The detection of the emotional responses through neuromarketing tools, associated with the non-profit communication, resulted particularly effective and verified an increment of 35% of the donations. Analyses performed with neuromarketing techniques allowed to understand both emotional intensity and cognitive involvement and to understand the best solution, according to the target audience and the aim of Unicef.
Highlights
Non-profit organizations are widely supported by donations and need effective communications, focusing on good behavioral changes (McKeever, 2013)
Individuals who are not involved in a specific social issue may not have the willingness to acquire information (O’Cass and Griffin, 2006), and this calls into consideration the real effectiveness of social advertising, considering that personal involvement can have a role in determining the attention to an advertising (Kokkinaki and Lunt, 1999)
The aim of this study was to assess the effectiveness of the Unicef bequest campaign in terms of emotional response, comparing different stimuli, to optimize communication and its effect on the target audience
Summary
Non-profit organizations are widely supported by donations and need effective communications, focusing on good behavioral changes (McKeever, 2013). Research traditionally uses self-report measures to detect emotions, but other perspectives state that this measurement may not capture the complexity of the emotional experience, since it is based on verbal expressions allowing to capture only the conscious side of emotions (Micu and Plummer, 2010) and it is subjected to cognitive bias or social desirability (Missaglia et al, 2017) In this sense, an important role is played by the neuroscience applied to consumer psychology which helps in understanding the role of advertising in consumers that process messages and in which emotions are relevant in the building of meaning (Passyn and Sujan, 2006). In the specific area of social marketing, understanding emotions could be useful to understand the behavioral change and the important process that leads the target audience to develop the donation intent (Hopkins et al, 2014)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
