Examining consumer perception towards social media Advertising: the impact of advertising creativity, Emotional appeal and product information

Abstract

With the emergence of social media, advertisers started grabbing attention of hundreds of millions of social media users towards their advertised brands through displaying advertisements on social media. Social media nowadays became an important part of everyday lives of individuals, where social media is not only used as a medium of pictures, videos uploading but is now used by advertisers as an advertising platform of their brands. The aim of this research study is to examine the attitude of consumers towards social media advertising with respect to emotional appeal, advertising creativity and product information. The research topic was very broad and it was carried out to know how different variables in social media advertising impact users and how much they are influenced by these variables. It is much important for advertisers to understand that how consumers contemplate on viewing displayed advertisement message content as the main purpose of this study is to observe consumers attitude, perception and usage of social media. There are three independent variables included in this study of research (i.e. Emotional Appeal, Advertising Creativity and Product Information) along with one of the dependent variables (i.e. Consumers Attitude towards social media advertising). In the first stage, the data of research was collected in the form of responses on Google forms. Overall 372 responses were received against the surveyed questionnaires, which were later analysed through a software (SPSS Version-20). Various tests were performed including the test of Reliability, Correlation, Regression, Normality and Descriptive Statistics check. By analysing the results, the researcher came to know that the hypothesis was correct as there was a positive relation between advertising creativity, emotional appeal and product information with consumer attitude towards social media advertising and all these variables had substantial positive impact on the attitudes of consumer. Further this research provides valued suggestions to marketers in making such strategies or policies of advertising and promoting their brands without creating discriminating factor of gender, religion, colour or race. Moreover, this research study can be further improvised by addition of more variables, more resources and conduction of research for a longer time span. Keywords: Social media advertising (SMA), Emotional Appeal, Product Information/ Informativeness, Advertising Creativity (AC), Consumer Attitude, Consumer behaviour