How Mortality Salience Shapes Consumers’ Responses to Brands

Consumers are frequently exposed to death-related information (e.g., news about terrorist attacks, natural disasters), which may make their mortality salient (MS; Greenberg et al. 1990). Yet, the understanding of how MS influences everyday consumption is still limited (Huang et al. 2018). Adding to this literature, we propose that MS can systematically impact consumers’ brand preference. Specifically, we argue that (a) MS sensitizes consumers to the perceived perpetuity of brands, and (b) exciting (vs. other) brands tend to be perceived as less perpetual. As a result, MS dampens consumers’ preference for brands with an exciting but not with other personalities. Consumers can “manage” their fear of death by symbolically achieving perpetual existence (Lifton 1973). The onset of MS thus can drive consumers to focus on the means to attain perpetuity (Mikulincer and Florian 2000). Building on this, we propose that MS can increase the weight of perpetuity-related aspects in consumer preference. We study this proposition in the context of branding. Brands may possess different personalities (Aaker 1997). We argue that different personalities are associated with the notion of perpetuity to varying degrees. Specifically, many of the traits comprising an exciting brand personality (e.g., young, contemporary) are fleeting in nature. Exciting states also tend to be short-lasting (Eysenck 2016). Thus, brands with an exciting (vs. other) personality tend to be perceived as having relatively lower levels of perpetuity. Because MS makes consumers become more sensitive to perceived perpetuity, we propose that exciting (vs. other) brands tend to be preferred less under MS.