One of the golden rules for advertising placement is that bad vibes are contagious.
Simply having an ad appear next to a controversial social media post or a tragic news story can cast a pall on a brand or product.
But it turns out some products were viewed more favorably by being positioned next to bad news, according to new marketing research from the University of Georgia.
Specifically, when consumers are looking for a useful product that is going to get a tough job done, they trust the product more when it’s presented with negative images.
“There are some situations where you’re expecting to see the benefit of the product further in the future, or you’re going to have to cope with some costs to get to that benefit,” said marketing professor Marcus Cunha Jr., the Robert O. Arnold Professor of Business at UGA’s Terry College of Business. “Consumers might not make a direct association, but if they are exposed multiple times, they might eventually see the brand presented with negative images as a bitter pill — one that works better.”
Cunha’s paper, When Learning Negative Brand Associations Leads to Evaluations of Effectiveness, was published in the Journal of Consumer Research in the fall of 2024.
The psychological principle behind why we like fun products more when they’re displayed next to cute puppies and deferred benefits when they’re displayed next to garbage piles is called affect transfer. Consumers learn to associate the product with the mood of the news image or headline placed nearby over repeated viewings, Cunha explained.
“That’s why in marketing there’s a general notion that you don’t want to have your brand associated with neutral or negative images,” Cunha said.
He and his co-author, Julian K. Saint Clair of Loyola Marymount University, thought there might be times when negative image and mood transfer might benefit a product, for instance, if it had to do with safety or self-improvement.
“We learn that if a medicine is going to make me feel better, it cannot taste good,” he said. “I get a shot. I know it’s painful, but it’s worth it because it is going to protect me from something worse. So, we thought for useful products, perhaps associating negative things with those brands would make consumers believe that the product will be more effective.”
To test this proposition, the researchers asked participants to look at ads for two brands of vitamins paired with either positive or negative images.
When asked which brand they would choose, the study subjects were twice as likely to choose the brand that had been displayed next to a negative image.
The opposite was true when an ad for a social media app was placed next to both positive and negative images. Fewer people wanted to try the social media app when it was displayed next to photos of garbage.
The experiment also found that an ad playing up the effective attributes of a product performed much worse when it was placed next to a positive image instead of a negative image.
Another experiment tested an ad for a fictitious news app, called Newsie, above Facebook posts with positive or negative images with taglines for the news app, calling it the “most effective” news app or the most “user friendly” news app.
When the “user friendly” tagline was paired with positive images, it increased the ad’s click-through rate. But when the “most effective” tagline was used, the click-through rate rose on the ad next to negative images.
Cunha doesn’t think that advertisers of “useful” products will start paying for placement near bad news, but it may impact the images that ad directors choose for their campaigns.
“Let’s think in terms of the imagery in the ad,” he said. “This may mean that instead of using a puppy or monkey in your ad you might have something less pleasant, if you’re trying to sell a product to people who are focused on its effectiveness.”
The research also has implications for health promotion, financial literacy or emergency preparedness campaigns — anywhere you can tap into people’s “no pain, no gain” mindset.
In the future, Cunha would like to see if imagery could be used to get consumers to think about delayed rewards or outcomes to make these kinds of health and preparedness campaigns more resonant.
“I would like to learn more about how we get people to shift their attention from the immediate reward to the long-term cost or benefit of their behavior,” he said. “That would have implications for public policy — how can we prevent people from overindulging, from not saving or investing and think about the future consequences of harmful behavior.”