Offensive ads that reinforce stereotypes and disparage a group of people have been mainly posited as having a negative effect on purchase intentions of consumers. However, this purported negative effect on sales of offensive brands is incongruent with the growing trend of offensive advertising. In this paper, we demonstrated that offensive ads have a positive sales effect over the long term in a series of experiments. Specifically, we showed that there is a larger increase of sales of the discriminated group than the nondiscriminated group, over time. This overall positive sales effect can be explained by the sleeper effect, where the offensive context is forgotten over time. and, by selfmotivations in accordance to the Compensatory Consumption Theory. In the long term, self-esteem was found to moderate the relationship between “identity with my group” and purchase intentions. For low self-esteem individuals, less identification with the group, is related to wanting to purchase the product. While for high self-esteem individual’s higher identification means higher purchase intentions.

Practically, these findings showed how offensive ads reinforce stereotypes and can be effective when targeting low self-esteem individuals. Hopefully, this will raise new ethical problems, limiting the use of such ads.

• Enav Friedmann(Bar-Ilan University)