This study extended consumers' self-regulatory focus, which has been primarily studied in advertising contexts, to word-of-mouth (WOM) situations. For this purpose, a 2 (self-regulatory focus: prevention focus motivation / promotion focus motivation) × 2 (advertising message: image advertising message / attribute advertising message) × 2 (time pressure: 30 seconds / 30 minutes) between-subjects factorial design was applied in the advertising context. In the WOM context, a 2 (self-regulatory focus: prevention focus motivation / promotion focus motivation) × 2 (WOM information type: image cue information / attribute cue information) × 2 (temporal distance to purchase: 1 day / 2 weeks) between-subjects factorial design was applied. A digital camera was selected as the experimental product, and a fictitious brand name was used after conducting a pretest to control for consumers' prior knowledge and familiarity. The analysis results showed that in the advertising context, consumer attitudes emerged through the interaction between self-regulatory focus motivation and advertising message type. However, although the interaction effect between self-regulatory focus motivation and time pressure was observed, the results differed from the hypothesized direction. In the WOM context, consumers' self-regulatory focus exhibited interaction effects with WOM information cues and temporal distance to purchase, respectively. Particularly in the WOM context, consumers with promotion focus motivation showed more favorable consumer attitudes as the purchase point was closer, while consumers with prevention focus motivation showed relatively higher consumer attitudes as the temporal distance to purchase was greater, demonstrating that consumer preferences are clearly formed differently depending on temporal distance to purchase. Therefore, consumers' self-regulatory focus was shown to result in different product attitudes being formed in advertising versus WOM contexts.