Cry, Laugh, or Fight: The Impact of the Advertising Image and Disease Target Match on Consumers’ Evaluations of Cancer Advertising Kimberly A. Taylor Florida International University Jana Nekesa Knibb University of Miami ABSTRACT Cancer detection and treatment is now a huge part of the health care system, and many cancer charities and organizations advertise heavily in various media. However, from pink ribbons to yellow wristbands, marketing spending and imagery are vastly different between diseases that primarily affect men and those that primarily affect women. Yet, the ways in which consumers react to specific marketing images when used in cancer-related advertising, and the importance of the congruence between the disease and the ad image have been under-researched. This paper explores these research questions in two studies and finds significant differences in ad evaluations by image and gender of the disease target. C  2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. With nearly 1.6 million new cancer diagnoses and 572,000 deaths expected in the United States in 2011 (Siegel, Ward, Brawley, & Jamal, 2011), cancer detec- tion and treatment is now a huge part of the health care system and a major business in the United States. Spending for cancer-related medical care is projected to top $158 billion by 2020 (Mariotto, Yabroff, Shao, Feuer, & Brown, 2011). Moreover, hospitals, cancer treatment centers, and even nonprofit organizations, such as the American Cancer Society, advertise heav- ily in various media in an effort to increase consumer awareness of their organizations, secure donations to their causes, and even solicit patients for treatment. Cancer advertising uses a variety of images and emo- tional appeals ranging from the “warriors in pink” im- agery used in much of the breast cancer awareness advertising, to the “shiny, happy” images of smiling patients happy to have completed treatment, to the more pathos-inducing emotional images of people who have lost loved ones to the disease. In addition, while prostate cancer (an exclusively male disease) is diag- nosed at roughly the same rate as female breast cancer, it gets far less federal funding (May, 2010) and market- ing dollars, and men’s diseases tend to be marketed differently than women’s diseases (Ehrenreich, 2009). Therefore, the images used in the marketing of can- cer raise important research questions about how con- sumers perceive and react to these images. In par- ticular, it is worth exploring how all of this cancer marketing impacts consumers’ product-related evalu- ations, actions, and intentions (such as willingness to donate money to the organization). This paper seeks to understand whether or not the differential levels of support for female-targeted versus male-targeted dis- eases translate into more positive advertising evalua- tions and behavioral intentions for the female-targeted disease ads. It also further seeks to explore how these evaluations and intentions might differ based on the congruence between the image used and the disease target. LITERATURE AND HYPOTHESES DEVELOPMENT Cancer Marketing Before reviewing the advertising literature and gener- ating research hypotheses, it is important to provide some background on cancer marketing, especially as it pertains to the predominant gender of the disease target or of the consumer. According to the book Pink Ribbon Blues, “breast cancer holds a very prominent Psychology and Marketing, Vol. 30(4): 318–331 (April 2013) View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/mar C  2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. DOI: 10.1002/mar.20608 318