Religious Responses to “Selling Happiness”: Negative Consequences for Attitude Toward the Ad and Attitude Toward the Brand

Intuitively, appealing to people’s desire to be happy should be universally well received by consumers, or at least not harmful to consumer’s perceptions of a brand; almost everyone wants to be happy and can relate to the desire to be happy. This article show that this is not necessarily true. Promising happiness in advertisement can cause negative attitude toward the ad and toward the advertised brand for religious people. We further demonstrate via a moderated mediation analysis conducted on a sample of 273 American adults that religious response to “selling happiness” is bounded by whether individuals’ religiosity is intrinsically or extrinsically motivated.