Should Charities Touch the Heart or the Mind? The Impact of People’s Self-Monitoring

This research extents our understanding of the relationship between self-monitoring and the effectiveness of emotional versus informational advertisements. More specifically, this relationship is investigated in a charity context. The results of two experimental studies in which the emotional and rational content of advertisements is manipulated show that for low self-monitors, both emotional and rational arguments are seen as valuable information and can be effective, irrespective of their degree and type of involvement. High self-monitors rely largely on the emotional content of the ad, especially under low and high emotional involvement. When high self-monitors are high rationally involved, purely rational or emotional ads can be effective, but the combination of high emotionality and high rationality leads to a decrease in ad effectiveness.