Influence of Controversial Advertisement on Consumer Behavior

Abstract

Along with other factors affecting human behavior, mass media advertising is a very useful tool to influence consumer behavior, on a large scale. But, one important issue related to advertisements is controversial advertising. It is observed that when the advertisements are perceived controversial by people, such advertisements create negative effects not only on product or brand, but also affect the organizational reputation. It is evident that there is a relationship between advertisements and consumer behavior, but there is still an extreme lack of research articulating relationship between controversial advertisements and consumer behavior. Scholars also suggested that there is a need to consider and investigate what are the nature of consumers in controversial & offensive ads and how do they respond to controversial ads differently.