The effect of marketing messages on changing behaviour disorders

• Autor(a) principal: Pinto, Mafalda Nogueira Silvério Salvador
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/25350
• topic: Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Economia e Gestão

Behaviour disorders such as over-eating and smoking have been a constant debate in many societies throughout the years, being prejudicial not only for the individuals’ health but also resulting in heavy burdens on the society. Consequently, regulators and public authorities have been trying to implement warning messages that can guide consumers to stop embracing such behaviour disorders. Hence, the main purpose is to understand how public regulators can more effectively use different messages’ framing to address different behaviour scenarios, which ultimately will decrease the effect these disorders have on society. Additionally, there is also the goal to understand if there are any differences between consumers’ characteristics, as low and high self-regulated consumers, understanding which message frame is more effective among both types. With these objectives in mind, six in-depth interviews and an online experimental study was used to reach insightful results. The main conclusions taken from the present study indicate that smoking disorder is considered as an addictive behaviour, and that a loss-framed message would work best on prevention warnings and a gain-framed message in medical detection warnings. Furthermore, high self-regulated smokers tend to be less influenced by these warnings, due to their intrinsic self-control. Smokers knowingly keep smoking, not being motivated to quit, preferring to endure in medical examinations to monitor health. Contrarily, overweight consumers do not consider over-eating as an addictive behaviour, believing to be able to lose the excess weight at any time. Hence, framing conditions do not influence their behaviour like in the smoking disorder.