Guilt Decreasing Marketing Appeals: the Efficacy of Luxury Vacation Advertising among Chinese tourists

Guilt is relevant to a variety of consumption experiences and marketers have used advertising to arouse guilt as a way to stimulate sales. However, the ability of advertising to decrease guilt has been neglected by marketing and tourism scholars. The aim of this research is to assess the role of guilt-decreasing appeals in reducing anticipated guilt towards a luxury vacation. An experimental study shows that guilt can be reduced without compromising the hedonic benefits of a guilty pleasure. Moreover, the results show that the more successful an advertisement is in depressing anticipated guilt, the more successful it is in enhancing attitude toward the ad and toward the promoted vacation.