The effects of sexual social marketing appeals on cognitive processing andpersuasion

Increasingly, social marketers are using sexual information in public servi ce announcements and collateral material for a wide range of causes. This s tudy builds on, previous research to explain how sexual appeals can affect cognitive processing and persuasion for "help-self" social marketing topics . It also goes beyond traditional single-message research designs by testin g matched pairs of appeals (sexual / nonsexual) for 13 social marketing top ics. The major finding was that sexual appeals were more persuasive overall than matched nonsexual appeals for social marketing topics. Sexual appeals also stimulated more favorable ad execution-related thoughts but had a neg ative effect an cognitive elaboration (e.g., support and counterarguments). Respondents also reported that sexual appeals were more attention, getting , likeable, dynamic, and somewhat more apt to increase their interest in th e topic than. were nonsexual appeals. These findings suggest that persuasio n is largely the result of peripheral processing and distraction from somew hat unpleasant messages when receivers are expected to counterargue the mes sage or be resistant to change.