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Executive Summary
This article highlights an important media context effect that calls for managers’ attention in media planning: the domestic brand preference induced by death-related media contexts. Four lab and field studies show that in the presence of a death-related media context (e.g., the news coverage of death-related topics, such as fatal car crashes, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters), consumers enhance their feelings of patriotism to buffer themselves against the anxiety induced by death-related thoughts. As a result of this heightened patriotism, consumers show a domestic brand preference—namely, a more favorable attitude toward domestic brands over foreign brands. The authors further analyze this death-induced domestic brand preference effect and its boundary conditions. First, contrary to most media context effects, the death-related context effect merely appears with a temporal delay between the media exposure and the brand evaluation. The reason is that death-related thoughts often have the strongest effects when they are nonconsciously accessible (which is caused by the temporal delay). Furthermore, this effect persists for 24 hours as long as participants’ death-induced anxiety is not attenuated. Second, a field study validates and extends the effects of death-related media contexts in a real choice setting with nonstudent respondents. Finally, the authors show that the negative response to foreign brands can be reversed when these brands express a prodomestic attitude by ad claims.

Media context effects are claimed as rather trivial and can even be ignored after a temporal delay. However, this study illustrates that instead of diminishing, the effects of death-related media contexts merely appear after a temporal delay, and more importantly, this effect can persist for even 24 hours. In real life, news programs do not always end with death-related topics, but often with neutral topics or sports items, before consumers are exposed to a series of advertisements. This delay might be enough for the death-related contextual effects to take place. Thus, placing brand advertisements a while after death-related media contexts cannot avoid the negative effects on foreign brands, but it may even exacerbate the harm. This article cautions brand managers that media context, even a seemingly neutral and unrelated one, needs to be taken into account when executing strategies to enter a foreign market.

Biography
Jia (Elke) Liu is an assistant professor in the Department of Marketing, Faculty of Economics and Business, at the University of Groningen She received her BA and MSc from Nankai University, China, and Wageningen University, the Netherlands, respectively, and her PhD from Tilburg University, the Netherlands. Jia’s current research focuses on consumer decision making and the nonconscious effects of environmental cues, such as money and death, on consumers’ perception, motivation, and consumption behavior.

Dirk Smeesters is Associate Professor of Marketing in the Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus University, the Netherlands, where he teaches courses on marketing management and experimental methods. He received his BA, MA, and PhD in Psychology from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. His research has been published in academic psychology and marketing journals, such as Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. His current research interests include terror management theory, consumer decision making, automaticity and nonconscious processes, and social comparison.

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