58 The Urge to Splurge General Discussion The first objective of this study was to identify whether companies engaging in sustainability initiatives should communicate through self-benefit- or other-benefit-framed advertisements to enhance the number of impulse purchases. The literature on sustainability management showed that consumers value a company’s engagement in sustainability-driven activities (Coleman, Royne, & Pounders, 2019). However, expressing these activities in advertisements could be interpreted as ethically doubtful and, therefore, backfire (Barone, 2000; also see Chang & Cheng, 2015), thus complicating companies’ decision-making on what frame to use in their advertisements. Therefore, various researchers have recommended further in-depth studies on the advertising appeals of sustainability-driven companies (e.g., Taylor, 2018). The second objective was to examine the role of justification in the effect of advertising framing on purchase behavior. Until now, very little attention has been devoted to justification processes, especially moral justification processes, of (impulsive consumer) behavior, while understanding justification is important to fully comprehend behavior (Holland et al., 2002). With three experiments, the present study shows that other-benefit-framed advertisements (compared to self-benefit-framed advertisements) have an effect on consumers’ moral justifications and that these subsequently affect consumers’ impulsive buying urges and impulse buying behavior of indulgent products. Advertising framing does not seem to affect impulse buying through deservingness justification. Our results also show that advertising framing has a direct effect on impulse buying behavior; other-benefit-framed advertisements lead to more impulse purchases than self-benefit-framed advertisements. Thus, the results of this study suggest that consumers need an altruistic reason to impulsively buy a self-indulgent product, and that sustainability-driven companies can provide these reasons to them by means of advertising. These findings contribute to both sustainability management research and stakeholder theory, as they argue that business and ethics should not and cannot be separated (Hörisch et al., 2014). An other-benefit frame combines business Figure 4: Conceptual model showing the observed results of each of the tested hypotheses in Experiment 1-3. Note: * Significant effect measured in one study | ** significant effect in two studies Other-benefit ad (vs. self-benefit ad) Moral justification Impulse buying urges Impulse buying behavior + + + + H3** H1, n.s. H2** E2,3 E1, 2, 3 E2, 3 H4* E3 + +
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