Not a great help after all

Warning labels on cigarette packs may be well and good, but a new study suggests advertisements for products designed to help people stop smoking…or, for that matter, to lose weight, reduce debt or otherwise stop bad behavior…should carry a health warning of their own.

That's because so-called remedy advertisements have a boomerang effect. By suggesting the risks of misbehaviour are manageable, they reduce the chances that people who need help will decide to get it, says Lisa E. Bolton, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania, and her colleagues in the Journal of Consumer Research.

Testing time

In one test, smokers and nonsmokers read material about the benefits of a stop-smoking aid. Members of a second group, also comprising smokers and nonsmokers, read material about how to quit smoking unaided. Then they were given a questionnaire that asked whether they thought an aid would help them quit cigarettes, about their perceived risk of smoking, and whether they planned to stop. (Nonsmokers were asked to assume they smoked.)

The results were unequivocal: Both smokers and nonsmokers who read about the aid saw smoking as less of a health risk. Moreover, they were less likely to indicate they would quit smoking after reading about the aid — and the most extreme reactions occurred among those who smoked the most.

Additional experiments produced equally compelling evidence, Bloom said. One tested an ad for smoking patches. Another pushed a bill-consolidation programme to manage or eliminate credit card debt. Still another touted Chitosan RX Ultra, a diet aid.

Again, those who most needed to stop smoking, cut credit card debt or shed pounds were the most likely to downplay the risks of their problems after reading about a remedy. They also expressed greater intention to continue behaving badly after seeing the ads promising help, even if they doubted the claims made in the ad.

“As problem status rises, remedy messages undermine risk perceptions and increase intentions to engage in risky behaviour,'' essentially offering men and women behaving badly “a get out of jail free card,'' Bloom and her colleagues concluded.

Los Angeles Times– Washington Post