We’Re Not All in This Together: Consumers Dislike Empathy-Based Advertisements During the Covid-19 Pandemic

How should brands advertise during COVID-19? Across multiple studies, we examine consumer attitudes toward advertising during a global pandemic, COVID-19. We find that attempts at empathy ("we're all in this together") perform worse than attempts at humor, and the best strategy can be to not advertise at all.



Citation:

Eric VanEpps, Craig Brimhall, and Brad Bitterly (2021) ,"We’Re Not All in This Together: Consumers Dislike Empathy-Based Advertisements During the Covid-19 Pandemic", in NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 49, eds. Tonya Williams Bradford, Anat Keinan, and Matthew Matthew Thomson, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 910-910.

Authors

Eric VanEpps, University of Utah
Craig Brimhall, University of Utah
Brad Bitterly, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology



Volume

NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 49 | 2021



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