46 The Urge to Splurge conflict by providing consumers with reasons, communicated through a self-benefit or other-benefit advertising frame, that should justify the vice choice and thereby the purchase. According to Oxford Languages (n.d.), justification is “the action of showing something to be right or reasonable.” Comparable to this definition is that of Park and Hill (2018). They state that justification involves finding reasons for one’s actions. Marketers and advertisers respond to this knowledge by, for example, adding health claims to unhealthy indulgent foods, hoping that such claims offer justifications for indulgence. Accordingly, research shows that right health claims (e.g., ‘low fat’) can decrease internal goal conflict and increase indulgent behavior (Belei et al., 2012). People need to justify their urges and behaviors because the discrepancy between behavior(al urges) and beliefs or long-term goals can cause unpleasant psychological feelings of cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957, also see Kivetz & Zheng, 2006; Londoño & Ruiz de Maya, 2022) or, when behavior and ethical standards do not align, feelings of ethical dissonance (Kim et al., 2021). A study on ethical dissonance and the effects of advertising frames showed that people who realized that they performed unethical behavior attempted to alleviate their feelings of dissonance by adopting other-unrelated ethical behaviors after being exposed to other-benefit messages (Kim et al., 2021). This reinforces the idea that people want to limit feelings of dissonance as much as possible and that advertising frames can help people to achieve that goal. However, the present research will study the extent to which advertising frames can also help consumers to justify their behavior(al urge) that otherwise might have caused feelings of cognitive or ethical dissonance. We argue that feelings of dissonance will diminish when consumers either act in line with their (ethical) beliefs and goals and thus resist the conflicting urge to buy hedonic products on impulse (e.g., the consumer does not buy the indulgent food because of its goal to be healthier or its belief that irresponsible consumption pollutes the world), or when they give in to their urges but come up with a justified reason why this particular situation allows them to indulge (e.g., the consumer buys the indulgent food because this specific candy bar only contains 0.5% fat or because the brand plants trees to compensate their CO2 emissions). The easier it is for consumers to justify indulgent choices, the stronger their preference for those choices (Akamatsu & Fukuda, 2022). Justification can, therefore, be perceived as a coping strategy that helps consumers to feel better about their indulgent purchases (Yi & Baumgartner, 2011). Especially, consumers who buy on impulse need reassurance through justification (Warden, Wu, & Tsai, 2006). However, no research has explicitly studied the extent to which people copy the reasons to buy, provided by a self-benefit or other-benefit advertising frame, and use them as justification to buy on impulse. In fact, there is no unambiguous answer to the question of which advertising frame (self-benefit versus other-benefit) elicits the most positive outcomes in general. For example, some studies on green purchase behavior find stronger positive effects of self-benefit message frames over other-benefit frames (e.g., Visser, Gattol, & Helm, 2015; Yadav, 2016; Cozzio, Volgger, & Taplin, 2021), while others find the opposite (e.g., Wei, Lee, Kou, & Wu, 2014; Jäger & Weber, 2020). In addition, research on generating charitable support is not entirely unambiguous (e.g., Sattler et al., 2020). Fisher et al. (2008) claim that mainly other-benefit advertising frames enhance
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