This study examines how protective motivations influence financial product purchase intentions in emotionally salient digital context. Medical crowdfunding platforms provide a revealing context by embedding insurance offerings within vivid portrayals of patients facing life-threatening illnesses. This emotionally charged context enables us to identify emotional pathways that shape purchase decisions, with broader implications for understanding consumer behavior in digital financial services.
An online experiment with 444 participants manipulated disease acuteness between subjects. Structural equation modeling and bootstrap mediation analysis examined how future-oriented emotions (fear, hope and anticipated regret) mediate relationships between threat appraisal, coping appraisal and insurance purchase intentions, with disease acuteness as moderator.
Threat appraisal significantly increases fear and anticipated regret, while coping appraisal primarily influences hope. Fear mediates the relationship between threat appraisal and purchase intention, while hope mediates the coping appraisal-purchase intention relationship. Disease acuteness moderates these pathways, with acute conditions strengthening the impacts of threat appraisal on fear and coping appraisal on hope, while chronic conditions intensify the threat appraisal-anticipated regret link.
Findings inform strategies for affective marketing in digital financial services where emotional engagement shapes purchase decisions. Results contribute to policy discussions about balancing emotional appeal with consumer protection, particularly for platforms embedding financial products within emotional narratives
These findings advance understanding of consumer behavior in digital financial services by revealing how emotional contexts shape insurance decisions. The study extends the protection motivation theory by demonstrating distinct emotional pathways linking cognitive appraisals to behavioral intentions
