Introduction
Ads often promote products by showing celebrities or people similar to the target customers. These strategies, respectively, named celebrity endorsement and "keeping up with the Joneses," have long been used in advertising to persuade target customers. The current study considers those strategies to be envy evoking and studies consumer response to them in a cross-cultural setting.
Envy is a social emotion that arises when people make upward social comparisons (Smith & Kim, 2007). People feel envious when others have something valuable or desirable which they themselves do not have. By featuring a celebrity or similar others (e.g., their friends)...