59 Chapter 3 and ethics in one advertising frame, which, as is found in our experiments, appears to be more effective than using self-benefit frames, where the ethics part is not interlinked within the advertisement. Moreover, with these findings, this study contributes to the literature on advertising framing, justification, and impulse buying behavior. Previous studies have mainly studied the effects of other-benefit versus self-benefit message frames within the domains of donation behavior (e.g., Fisher et al., 2008) or eco-friendly behavior (e.g., Tih et al., 2016; Jäger & Weber, 2020) and have neither studied these frames in the contexts of corporate social responsibility nor impulse buying behavior. Furthermore, studies evaluating message framing have observed inconsistent results on the type of frame that is more effective (e.g., Yadav, 2016; Jäger & Weber, 2020). The present study adds to knowledge on the effects of message framing on impulse buying behavior in a sustainability management context by demonstrating, as hypothesized, that other-benefit-framed advertisements for socially responsible companies elicit more impulse purchases than self-benefit-framed advertisements. Additionally, we contribute to the limited but important research on justification-based mechanisms of consumers (Taylor, Webb, & Sheeran, 2014) by distinguishing between the two types of justifications. We studied their roles in the effect of message framing on impulsive consumer behavior and interpreted the outcomes in light of the vice/virtue response conflict. Moreover, we are the first to introduce the concept of moral justification to the marketing and consumer psychology literature, which potentially enriches the scientific perspective of advertising framing. People often experience an internal vice/virtue response conflict and feelings of cognitive dissonance when buying on impulse (Kubany et al., 1996; Lades, 2014). The reasons that sustainability-driven companies put forward, by means of an other-benefit framed advertisement, can help people feel morally justified to buy and, therefore, seemingly reduce this conflict and decrease cognitive dissonance. Assumedly, consumers feel more comfortable buying on impulse after being exposed to an other-benefit message (versus a self-benefit message), as such a frame answers both to one’s immediate gratification urges and one’s sense of responsibility for their long-term goals. In contrast to moral justification, our findings show that deservingness justification does not mediate the effect of message framing on impulse buying. This does not necessarily mean that self-benefit-framed messages do not help consumers to deal with their vice/ virtue conflicts. Theoretically, it is possible that a self-benefit frame does soften the conflict and reduce cognitive dissonance with consumers, only not by providing reasons to justify an impulse purchase but by stimulating people to act in line with their long-term goals. Perhaps a self-benefit-framed message (unintentionally) reminds people of their long-term goals by emphasizing the “self” in the message. This could also explain why, of our sample in Experiment 2, only 3.9% wanted to buy the cookies after being exposed to the self-benefit message frame versus 9.9% who wanted to buy the cookies after being exposed to the neutral message frame. Although this difference was not significant, it was remarkable that approximately three times as many people wanted to buy on impulse in the neutral condition compared to the self-benefit condition. This outcome would be interesting to study in more detail in the future. As we conducted a field experiment and two online vignette-based experiments, the external validity of our research was relatively high (compared to only
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