Adversarial Effects of Manipulative Advertisements on Consumer Buying Behaviour

Abstract

Manipulative advertising occurs frequently within the market. It has been questioned whether it is in a firm’s best interest to deceive the public through false, misrepresentative ads. This study seeks to examine whether customer is affected by the content that is showed in the advertisement or not or if they find that the advertisement was misleading so they stop using the product or not. This paper observes the impact of manipulative advertisement on consumer buying behavior in beauty products. There are 4 independent and 3 dependent variables of this research, dependent variable includes consumer attitudes, consumer behavior and purchase decision and Independent variables of this study are information, entertainment, credibility and value. Respondents for this study were from top ten cities of Pakistan that includes Karachi, Lahore, Faisalabad, Rawalpindi, Multan, Hyderabad, Gujranwala, Peshawar, Quetta and Islamabad. Data was analyzed on SPSS on the sample size of 160 people. By analyzing the results of the survey through reliability test, regression analysis and correlation it is identifies that advertiser’s play with the psyche of consumers through advertisements and use different tools to make them believe their claims are right. By applying the tests it was revealed that these advertisement do affect the consumer buying behavior. The research has reached its aims but still more work can be done on it, there were some unavoidable limitations. First, because of the time limitation the research was conducted on a small sample of metropolitan Cities of Pakistan, as the researcher resides in Islamabad majority of the data was collected from the twin cities for the research. This study focuses on the