The influence of the Foreign Language Effect (FLE) and fear appeals on the persuasiveness of anti-vaping advertisements.
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2023-06-24
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en
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This study investigated the influence of the Foreign Language Effect (Dutch vs English) on fear appeals versus informational appeals in anti-vaping advertisements in persuasive communication. The Foreign Language Effect (FLE) could possibly influence the persuasiveness of an ad by decreasing the emotionality of the ad in L2 (Puntoni et al., 2009) or increasing the rationality in L2 (Circi et al., 2021; Keysar et al., 2012). Previous research was done on fear appeals in anti-smoking advertisements (Manyiwa & Brennan, 2012), but no studies have included the influence of FLE on the persuasiveness of advertisements. This study filled the academic gap by providing research on the influence of the FLE and fear appeals and informational appeals on the persuasiveness of anti-vaping advertisements. To test this, four anti-vaping advertisements (fear appeal x Dutch; no fear appeal x Dutch; fear appeal x English; no fear appeal x English) were shown to 149 participants between the ages of 16 – 24. The results showed that no FLE or differences in persuasiveness found between the advertisements. This study reveals that when advertising for a Dutch target group, the use of L1 and L2 does not differ in terms of persuasiveness. Further research could focus on replicating this study with different languages.
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Faculteit der Letteren