Pangs from Persuasion: When Recommendations Undermine Consumers’ Social Worth

Research on the Persuasion Knowledge Model (PKM) (Friestad and Wright 1994) has documented many negative responses to persuasion attempts (Isaac and Grayson 2017), including lower attitudes towards salespeople (Campbell and Kirmani 2000; Decarlo 2005; Main et al. 2007; Reinhard et al. 2006), advertisements (Campbell 1995; Campbell and Keller 2003; Darke and Ritchie 2007), and brands (Ahluwalia and Burnkrant 2004; Wei et al. 2008). To explain these responses, several mechanisms have been implicated having to do with perceived selling motives, such as suspicion of ulterior motives, inferences of manipulative intent, and consumer skepticism (Kirmani and Zhu 2007; Isaac and Grayson 2016). However, it is not completely clear why selling motives should necessarily incite these responses because goals to sell or make profits are well-known to consumers before exposure to a communication (Babin et al. 1995; Boush et al. 1994) and are often top of mind (Thompson 1972; Bhattacharjee and Dana 2017). An alternative possibility is that consumers may see attempts to persuade as deceptive. Although this may explain some empirical findings (Forehand and Grier 2003), perceived deception is unlikely to fully account for consumers’ responses since they respond in the same way without deception (Campbell and Kirmani 2000; Main et al. 2007; Ahluwalia and Burnkrant 2004; Reinhard et al. 2006). The current work investigates a different reaction consumers may have to perceived persuasion, which we suggest is responsible, in part, for their negative reactions. We suggest that consumers react to the interpersonal implications of being the target of a persuasion attempt. We argue that labelling a communication as “persuasion” activates consumers’ beliefs that the agent is attempting to pursue their own interests instead of (and perhaps at the expense of) consumers’ interests. This violates an important norm of interpersonal conduct – not taking advantage of others – conveying a lack of respect and value for the consumer. In short, we suggest that perceiving a communication as an attempt to persuade may convey threatening information about consumers’ social worth.