Abstract
This study examined whether the effectiveness of philanthropic corporate advertisements can be accounted for by attribution theory and by dual-mode information-processing models of persuasion. The experiment manipulated the prosocial congruency of the philanthropic advertisement by presenting activities that supported the self-interest of the sponsor company (high prosocial congruency) or ones that appeared to be against the company's self-interests (low prosocial congruency). In addition, to examine whether philanthropic advertising was equally successful for companies initially evaluated in a neutral or a negative manner, sponsor companies were initially described in either neutral or negative terms. As anticipated, subjects expected sponsors to support activities congruent with their self-interests more than incongruent ones. However, these expectancies had no effect on advertisement effectiveness. Instead, companies described negatively generated less favorable evaluations than ones described positively. The discussion considers the implications of the results for practitioners.
Pool, Gregory James (1995). Expectancy formation in philanthropic corporate advertising. Master's thesis, Texas A&M University. Available electronically from
https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /ETD -TAMU -1995 -THESIS -P66.