Advertising Stigmatized Products: Leverage Social Norms or Break the Stigma?

Stigma-leveraging and stigma-disrupting messages are commonly used to promote stigmatized products. However, the relative effectiveness (persuasiveness) of these two advertising approaches remains unexplored. The current research fills this gap by studying consumers’ psychological and attitudinal responses to how the societal stigma around a stigmatized product is deployed (leveraged vs. disrupted) in the ad. Building on the stigma-by-association concept and the identity threat model of stigma, we argue (and show) that stigma-leveraging messages are less persuasive than both stigma-disrupting and stigma-neutral messages. We further show that the low persuasiveness of the stigma-leveraging message (relative to stigma-disrupting/stigma-neutral messages) is due to a devaluation threat it induces, which in turn leads to a lower self-brand connection (serial mediation). Finally, as we find that the persuasiveness of stigma-disrupting messages is no different from that of stigma-neutral messages, we recommend brands of stigmatized products to employ either of these advertising approaches rather than stigma-leveraging messaging.