Flutterby™! : Bad side effects sell more product

Warning of potential side effects of a product can increase its sales is the press release about Warnings of Adverse Side Effects Can Backfire Over Time, Yael Steinhart, Ziv Carmon, Yaacov Trope, in Psychological Science:

Carmon and colleagues tested their hypothesis in four experiments. In one experiment, for example, smokers saw an ad for a brand of cigarettes: one version of the ad included a warning that smoking causes lung cancer, heart disease, and emphysema, while another version did not include the warning.

Predictably, participants who had the opportunity to purchase the cigarettes soon after seeing the ad bought less if the ad they saw included the warning.

In contrast, participants who were given the opportunity to purchase the cigarettes a few days later bought more if the ad included the warning. The same outcome emerged when the researchers ran a similar experiment with ads for artificial sweeteners.

So warnings make things memorable, and fade to an abstraction after a few days...