Consumer Ethical Judgement of Threat Appeals: An Abstract

Abstract

Existing literature tends to examine ethical judgement in organizational contexts (Jones 1991; Trevino 1992), or the connection between ethical judgement and consumers’ own ethical or unethical behaviors (Hunt and Vitell 1986; Vitell et al. 2016). These debates under-represent consumers’ perspectives (Shabbir et al. 2018). Thus, we focus on unpacking the interconnections between consumer ethical judgment, consent and context. We do so by using Miller and Wertheimer’s (2010) theory of consent transactions to explore how consumers judge the morality of threat-based experiential marketing communication campaigns. An understanding of consent in ethical judgement is needed, where consumers might experience visceral emotions through marketing communications without being fully informed, and where the moral beliefs of marketers and consumers might clash (Wempe 2009). Given that ethical judgement involves the degree to which something is morally acceptable to a consumer (Reidenbach and Robin 1990), lack of perceived consent can lead to negative consumer ethical judgement. Therefore, there is a need to explore how consumers judge threat-based experiential communications.