Consumers often feel embarrassed when buying products like condoms, hemorrhoid cream, and beriberi cream in crowded pharmacies. There is an interesting phenomenon in life: Some beriberi creams use the images of a “real foot”, while others use the images of a “cartoon foot.” Imagine if a young woman needed to go to a retail store for beriberi cream that would embarrass her, she would choose a “real foot image” or a “cartoon foot image” beriberi cream? It has been shown that (...) the embarrassment of these products has a strong negative impact on consumer buying behavior. Previous researches have explored how changing packaging elements of embarrassing products can effectively reduce consumer embarrassment. However, few have examined the impact of different image types of embarrassing product packaging with embarrassment. Therefore, this research explores the effect of image types on consumers’ willingness to purchase embarrassing products and reveals the mechanisms of the underlying effects. The results show that natural images can lead to lower purchase intention of embarrassing products when the advertisement uses first-person pronouns due to the mediating role played by negative body imagery. However, there is no significant difference in purchase intention between different image types in the third-person pronouns. Finally, this paper discusses its contributions and limitations. (shrink)

Three years ago, my body began to slowly, incrementally, go haywire. Sometimes, I would wake up at night and my right arm would be alarmingly numb, taking several minutes to regain feeling. My right hand would ache for hours after I had been working on my laptop. I experienced numbness in the fingers of my right hand after pressing them against a hard surface. Tingling radiated down the back of my legs and into my calves, which I referred to as (...) "zings" or "fireworks."I was chronically constipated and had reoccurring hemorrhoids and anal fissures that produced blood in my stool. I saw dark specks in my eyes that an optometrist called "floaters." The glands in my neck were chronically swollen, and I was prone to... (shrink)