Acceptance of vulgarity in marketing: The moderating roles of product type and consumers’ political ideology

Abstract

One debate about theories of disgust surround whether the emotion is elicited by adaptationist or by cultural sensitivities. We examine this question by examining the disgust that profanity elicits. This research examines two moderators that predict consumers’ acceptance of vulgar language within advertising contexts. Specifically, we focus on product type (new vs old) and consumers’ political ideology (conservative vs liberal), proposing that conservatives (vs liberals) are less accepting of new (vs existing) products advertised using vulgar language. This is potentially because, we propose and find, conservative consumers are more sensitive to the disgust emotion, and new products advertised with vulgar language elicit more disgust. We conducted three experiments to test the hypotheses. Experiment 1 finds support for our overall hypothesis while Experiments 2 and 3 find evidence for the role of disgust via both mediation and moderation techniques. Our findings suggest that the disgust emotion is driven by cultural and not purely by evolutionary sensitivities. We are also the first authors, to our knowledge, to connect the disgust literature to vulgar language. Hence, our findings offer both practical and theoretical implications regarding the use of vulgar language in marketing.