Online advertorial attributions on consumer responses: materialism as a moderator
| Published date | 10 September 2018 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-08-2016-0214 |
| Date | 10 September 2018 |
| Pages | 697-717 |
| Author | Hsin Hsin Chang,Kit Hong Wong,Tsun Wei Chu |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Bibliometrics,Databases,Information & knowledge management,Information & communications technology,Internet,Records management & preservation,Document management |
Online advertorial attributions
on consumer responses:
materialism as a moderator
Hsin Hsin Chang
Department of Business Administration, National Cheng Kung University,
Tainan, Taiwan
Kit Hong Wong
Department of Health-Business Administration, Fooyin University,
Kaohsiung, Taiwan, and
Tsun Wei Chu
Department of Business Administration, National Cheng Kung University,
Tainan, Taiwan
Abstract
Purpose –Based on the Mehrabian–Russell theory, the purpose of this paper is to view the attributes of
advertorial information as a stimulus in an online environment to examine the emotional states of consumers
and their sequential behavioral responses. Moreover, materialism is proposed as a moderator in the
relationship between advertorial attributions and emotion.
Design/methodology/approach –By adopting a quantitative approach, 421 consumers with browsing
forums orblog experience participatedin the study. SEM techniqueswere adopted for the formal dataanalysis.
Findings –There was a causation found among control, arousal and pleasure. Advertorial attributes
influenced the consumers’emotional states via control, and emotional states directly affected the information
acceptance and purchase intention. Materialism partially moderated the relationship between the advertorial
information attributions and emotional states.
Practical implications –Advertorial editors should provide detailed product information with credible
sources in a positive manner and should attach videos or interesting pictures to avoid boredom and attract
reader attention, especially in the case of materialists. In addition, editors should also provide some related
hyperlinks for consumers to stimulate their further reading and then should observe the number of clicks and
shares to estimate the popularity of the advertorial, so adjustments can be made if necessary.
Originality/value –This paper confirmed the causation of pleasure, arousal and the validity of the
dominance (PAD) emotional model and found a partially moderating effect of materialism on the relationship
between the attributes of advertorials and the emotional states of consumers.
Keywords Materialism, Mehrabian–Russell theory, Online advertorial attributions,
Pleasure–arousal–dominance emotional model
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Online advertorials are camouflaged advertisements, which sprang up in the twentieth
century as internet-based magazinesincreased in number (Kim et al.,2001). As compared with
a traditional advertisement, advertorials can provide large amount of product or service
information intended to capture consumer attention for a longer period (Attaran et al., 2015).
Therefore,with the popularity of use of forums andblogs, online advertorials havebecome an
importanttool for firms to provide new productinformation and gain contactwith consumers.
According to the Market Intelligence& Consulting Institute, Taipei-MIC(2014), 46 percent of
online consumers used blogs to track specific bloggers, and 33 percent of online users used
forums to track specific brands and products. Market Intelligence & Consulting Institute,
Taipei-MIC (2014) reported that 81 percent of online users seek out information from
community websites, forums and blogs for related advertorials; e.g., 45 percent of them
Online Information Review
Vol. 42 No. 5, 2018
pp. 697-717
© Emerald PublishingLimited
1468-4527
DOI 10.1108/OIR-08-2016-0214
Received 20 November 2016
Revised 5 June 2017
25 October 2017
25 April 2018
Accepted 15 May 2018
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/1468-4527.htm
697
Online
advertorial
attributions
usually visitforums, and 33 percent usually visitblogs. These statistics implythe importance
of posting advertorials in forums andblogs and also lead to a research questionrelated to how
an advertorial can affect consumer responses to advertorials.
In the online environment, anyone can become an editor of an advertorial to share or
promote product or service information. For instance, consumers can share use experience
related to a product on a forum, or firms can recruit a blogger to write trial experience with a
product on a blog. Although online advertorials can be presented in many ways; there are
too many advertorials appearing every day on the internet. Therefore, the appearance of the
advertorial can be used to effectively attract consumer attention and stimulate further
action, so this has become a critical issue and has stimulated interest on the part of
advertorial editors and researchers.
According to the Mehrabian–Russell (M–R) environment psychology model (Mehrabian
and Russell, 1974), an environmental stimulus can predict individual behavior through
emotional states, which is commonly explained as a stimulus–organism–response (S–O–R)
model, where the emotional state (i.e. pleasure, arousal and dominance (PAD)) can be
stimulated by environmental elements. Since advertorials can be considered a type of online
advertisement and have similar functions of introducing new products or services to
consumers (Kimet al., 2001), the four online advertisement attributes as suggested by Ducoffe
(1996) are adopted as the environment stimulus in this study. Prior studies have commonly
used these four attributes to examine their effects on consumer behavior (Kim et al., 2010;
Sinkovics et al., 2012); however, few studies have discussed these effects in an advertorial
context. Moreover, prior studies have mostly considered aesthetics, operability, atmosphere
and website layout as the environmental stimuli (Chang et al., 2014) and have rarelyadopted
the four attributesin online environmentsin terms of how they stimulate useremotions. In the
emotional state,the PAD model is adopted to measure the emotional states of consumers,but
based on the concept suggested by Koo and Lee (2011), it is proposed here that PAD should
have a causal relationship, which is aroused in a step-by-step manner when a consumer is
reading information in an advertorial. Few studies have discussed the causation of PAD
(Chang et al., 2014).In the response stage, user acceptanceand purchase intention are adopted
to measure consumer response to the advertorial (Koo et al., 2014).
Furthermore,consumers with high levels of materialism are sensitiveto new products and
pay more attention to advertisement to obtain new informationthan their peers (Flynn et al.,
2016). They value possessions, and their acquisition is more important than other matters
(Watkins et al., 2016). Therefore, it is proposed that when the desire of highly materialistic
consumers is stimulated, their emotionalstate will be provoked to a higher degree thanwill be
the case for less materialistic consumers.Prior studies have rarely discussedmaterialism in an
information context. For example, Pilch and Górnik-Durose (2017) discussed materialism’s
mediating effecton narcissism and money attitude/product preferences; Davidson et al.(2017)
applied materialism as an antecedentof purchase of counterfeit products; Alhouti et al. (2016)
used materialismto predict online privacyconcerns and purchase behavior;and Watkins et al.
(2016) focusedon the factors related to the formationof materialism. These studies were more
focused on psychological topicsrather than on online and advertorial/advertisementcontexts.
Based on the above discussion, materialism is proposed here as a moderator, where it is
suggested that different levels of materialism will result in different emotional states when
consumers are stimulated by advertorial attributes.
To fill the researchgaps, a framework based on M–R theory is developed to firstexamine
the stimuluseffects of the four attributes ofadvertorials (informativeness,credibility, irritation
and entertainment) on emotional states and second, to test the causal relationships between
control, arousal and pleasure, and the consequent effects on user acceptance and purchase
intention, and finally, to examine the moderating effect of materialism on the relationships
between an information stimulus in the online environment and emotional states.
698
OIR
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