Effects of Altruistic Advertising on Consumers’ Subjective Well-Being: A Downward Comparison

Abstract

The study aims to examine the impact of altruistic advertisements on subjective well-being, materialism, and transpersonal gratitude through downward social comparison. An experimental design testing two conditions i.e., Altruistic advertising vs control was adopted to gather responses from 147 young consumers. Single-stage cluster sampling technique has been used to collect data. The findings of the study show that young consumers after experiencing altruistic advertising are less materialistic, more satisfied with their lives, and score high on transpersonal gratitude. Also, transpersonal gratitude is found to be a positive predictor of subjective well-being and a negative predictor of materialism. Furthermore, materialism negatively but partially mediates the relationship between transpersonal gratitude and life satisfaction. Few studies have experimentally tested the impact of advertising on consumers through downward social comparison but none has studied this impact in terms of different nuances of advertising and their impact on materialism or subjective well-being. Furthermore, the role of transpersonal gratitude has been examined that is merely been studied in the existing literature. Marketers working in the field of advertising can improve the quality of advertising by taking into consideration the negative impact of advertising on consumers/viewers. Gratitude interventions can be utilized to mitigate the negative effects of advertising. Data was cross-sectional which does not account for any longitudinal effects of altruistic advertisement on the above-mentioned relationship. Secondly, our sample consisted of young girls only which may affect the overall generalizability of the results with respect to gender and age. Thirdly, in our experiment, we only examine the effects of altruistic advertisement whereas hedonic and functional advertisement groups have not taken into account.