Attitude towards Advertising and Affect on Purchase Intention: Case Study of Supermarket
A. Overview
This paper presents a proposal to research and explore the attitudes of people when it comes to advertising where information will be drawn from the case of supermarkets. In this study, and how these generally affect the purchase intention will be investigated. At a glance, supermarkets tend to advertise profusely, enticing food shoppers with bargain prices and discounted offerings. Advertising magnifies the supermarket’s power to draw customer traffic. It would be necessary to explore this issue because of the changing schemes of advertising as well as the changing dynamics of consumerism thereby determine how supermarkets could thrive and respond to the changes.
B. Background
Advertising is defined in Webster’s dictionary “as the action of calling something to the attention of the public especially by paid announcements, to call public attention by emphasizing desirable qualities so as to arouse a desire to buy or patronize: promote.” Consumer Council (1999) noted that advertising is known as a mean of making a representation in any form in connection with a trade, business, craft or profession in order to promote the supply of goods or services, including immovable property, rights and obligations. Cronin (2000) states that advertising circulates knowledge and promotes not only the product, but as well as the image of the company that owns the product brand.
O’Shaughnessy and O’Shaughnessy (2003) maintain that advertising associates a specific product with one or more variables so it can be recalled easily. It associates products with symbols that exemplify values, group feeling, prestige, status, power, achievement or just plain hedonistic pleasure as well. Put simply, perceptions on the product will be affected when associated to others. Twitchell (1996) maintain that advertising can channel desires, and the channel communicates with the culture of the targeted population. As such, advertising has a power to shape consumers’ consciousness while also triggering their behaviors.
According to Chan and Chan (2005), advertisements communicate facts about the product or the brand. Competition forces certain brand names to become stronger than others because of product loyalty and name recognition. Consumers tend to buy what is already familiar to them. Branding involves decision which establishes an identity for a product with the goal of distinguishing such from that of the competitors. Creating an identity through branding is important especially in a business environment where competition is a commonplace. Branding is one aspect which helps position the products in the minds of the product’s target market. Basically, branding is achieved through the use of unique brand names and brand marks (Christ, 2009).
Consumable product features, on the other hand, are characteristics of a product that offer benefits to the customer. In most cases, the most important features are those associated with the consumable product since they are the main reason a customer makes a purchase. Consumable product features have two categories: functional and psychological. Functional benefits are benefits derived from features that are part the consumable product. These are called functional because they result in a benefit the user directly associates with the consumable product. Whereas, psychological benefits are benefits the customer perceives to receive when using the product though these may be difficult to measure and may vary by customer (Christ, 2009).
Defined simply as the plan to purchase a particular good or service in the future, purchase intention is predominantly determined by consumer attitude toward advertising and consumer product involvement. Brand behavior intention shows how much a customer values a brand and is demonstrated by the brand purchase intentions. The purchase intention of a customer gains importance when there are multiple competitors in the market and gives the focal brand an edge in various purchasing situations. Thereby, the greater the brand purchase intention of a customer, the greater the brand value (Kumar, 2008, p. 194).
C. Review of the Literature
A conceptual framework was developed for this study. There are four variables that the research will consider: attitude toward advertising, attitude toward brand, functional benefit of consumable product (usability) and purchase intention. To illustrate:
Attitude toward advertising
Teng, Laroche and Zhu (2007) explored how the dual model of advertisement and brand could explain consumer responses toward an advertisement and a brand. Their research had incorporated advertisement affect and competition into the framework and examined the effects of advertising on consumers’ attitudes and purchase intentions in multiple-ad and multiple-brand environments. It was found out that the higher level of affective responses to a focal ad significantly leads to a higher evaluation of that advertisement. Information about a competing ad and brand is processed comparatively and that evaluations of the competing ad and brand negatively influence evaluations of a focal advertisement and brand.
Petrovici and Marinov (2007) investigated the relationships between determinants and primary antecedents of advertising and attitudes to advertising. Their findings confirm that consumers in the two countries considered are more positive about advertising as an institution than the instruments used to promote advertising. While product information acquisition is the main personal use of advertising which influences general attitudes to advertising in one of the countries, the entertaining value of advertising was found the strongest personal use in another country. Attitudes toward the institution and instruments of advertising have no significant differences.
Ashill and Yavas (2005) examined the similarities and differences in the dimensionality of advertising attitudes. Advertising attitudes consist of social and economic dimensions. The dimensionality of these attitudes exhibits a fairly similar pattern across different countries. This implicates that advertisers should create advertisements that are believable. The positive relationship between believability and overall attitudes towards advertising also suggests that advertisers should be sensitive to tactics that generate consumer scepticism.
Attitude toward brand
Macrae (1996) noted that brand managers face many challenges (including questions of brand strength, world class culture, “glocal” branding, seeded marketing channels, “service smart” integration, brand architecture and brand organizing). Brand chartering was presented as a framework to think about the challenges and how to deal with them. Brand chartering has three principal elements: creating and communicating the brand, managing the brand organization, and directing and structuring the brand.
Wu and Lo (2009) studied the factors affecting consumers’ purchase intention towards the extended product. Results show that consumers show a relatively high purchase intention towards extended products. The relational structure shows that brand awareness has a significant influence on core-brand image (parent-brand image), thus indirectly affecting core-brand attitude and causing impacts on consumer purchase intention towards extended products. On the other hand, consumer perception fit has greater influence than core-brand attitude, denoting that both the brand association and product connection have a remarkable influence on consumer purchase intention towards extended products.
Functional benefits
Del Rio, Vasquez and Iglesias (2001) assert that little attention has been paid to comparing the role of product and brand name attributes in obtaining differential advantages. What they did is to analyse the phenomenon based the benefits of these attributes as conceived by consumers. Two types of benefits are identified in both attributes – functional and symbolic benefits – and the dimensions of each of these benefits are specified. Evidences were found that in the market benefits associated to the brand name consumers observe greater differences between the brands than in the product-associated benefits. This result suggests that the brand name can be a key strategy for the firm to enjoy comparative advantages.
Purchase intention
Ying and Chung (2007) investigated how attitude towards and purchase intention of a product will be affected by involvement level and presentation order of positive and negative word-of-mouth (WOM) information. It was found that subjects tend to base their evaluations more on later information than earlier information regardless of involvement level. This recency effect was consistently found across the product categories. Such findings implicate the necessity of positioning messages that are favoured when both positive and negative information needs to be presented.
Hermann, Huber and Coulter (1997) examined the effects of four factors (the bundle: pure or mixed, the price discount, the functional complementarily of bundle components, and the number of bundle components) on consumers’ intentions to purchase product and service bundles. The findings were relatively consistent across product and service, and illustrate that pure bundles are preferred to mixed bundles, and a greater price discount is preferred to a lesser one. The results also indicate that five component bundles generate greater purchase intention than either three or seven component bundles, and that “very related” bundle components result in greater purchase intention than either moderately or not related components.
D. Research Question
The key question that will be addressed in this study is: How do attitudes toward advertising affect the purchase intention of supermarket patrons? Various hypotheses are formulated for the study to validate.
H1: Attitude toward advertising affects attitude toward brands.
H2: Perceptions on functionality of consumable products affect attitudes on brand.
H3: Attitude toward advertising affects purchase intention.
H4: Attitude on brand affects purchase intention.
E. Objective of the Study
The main objective of this research is to analyse how attitude toward advertising affects purchase intentions of supermarket patrons. Specifically, research objectives are as follows:
1) Explore how attitudes on advertising and brand shapes purchase intention
2) Investigate how functionality of a consumable product could lead to a purchase intention
F. Methodology
The research strategy that the study will utilize is the descriptive method. A descriptive research intends to present facts concerning the nature and status of a situation, as it exists at the time of the study (Creswell, 1994). It is also concerned with relationships and practices that exist, beliefs and processes that are ongoing, effects that are being felt, or trends that are developing. (Best, 1970) In addition, such approach tries to describe present conditions, events or systems based on the impressions or reactions of the respondents of the research (Creswell, 1994). This research is also cross-sectional because of limited time. This research is a study of a particular phenomenon (or phenomena) at a particular time. (Saunders et al, 2003) Accordingly, cross-sectional studies often employ the survey strategy, and they may be seeking to describe the incidence of a phenomenon or to compare factors relating to supermarkets.
In this study, primary and secondary research will be both incorporated. The reason for this is to be able to provide adequate discussion for the readers that will help them understand more about the issue and the different variables that involve with it. The primary data for the study will be represented by the survey results that will be acquired from the respondents. On the other hand, the literature reviews to be presented in the second chapter of the study will represent the secondary data of the study. The secondary sources of data will come from published articles from business and advertising journals and theses and related studies on advertising.
Reference
Ashill. J A & Yavas, U 2005, ‘Dimensions of advertising attitudes: Congruence between Turkish and New Zealand consumers,’ Marketing Intelligence and Planning, vol. 23, no. 4, pp. 340-349.
Best, J W 1970, Research in Education, 2nd edn, Prentice Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, N.J.
Consumer Council 1999, Ways to Improve the Regulation of Advertising, Java Road, Hong Kong.
Creswell, J W 1994, Research design: Qualitative and quantitative approaches, Sage, Thousand Oaks, California.
Cronin, A M 2000, Gender, Images, and Rights, Routledge, New York.
Del Rio, A B, Vasquez, R & Victor, I 2001, ‘The role of the brand name in obtaining differential advantages,’ Journal of Product and Brand Management, vol. 10, no.7, pp. 452-465.
Kumar, V 2008, Managing Customer for Profit: Strategies to Increase Profits and Build Loyalty, Wharton School Publishing.
Macrae, C 1996, ‘Re-thinking brand management: the role of brand chartering,’ Marketing Intelligence & Planning, vol. 14, no. 7, pp. 46-55.
Petrovici, D & Marinov, M 2007, ‘Determinants and antecedents of general attitudes towards advertising: A study of two EU accession countries.
Teng, L, Laroche, M & Zhu, H 2007, ‘The effects of multiple-ads and multiple-brands on consumer attitude and purchase behaviour,’ Journal of Consumer Marketing, vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 27-35.
Wu, S I & Lo, C L 2009, ‘The influence of core-brand attitude and consumer perception on purchase intention towards extended product,’ Asia Pacific Journal of Marketing and Logistics, vol. 21, no. 1, pp. 174-194.
Ying, H L & Chung, C Y 2007, ‘The effects of single-message single-source mixed word-of-mouth on product attitude and purchase intention,’ Asia Pacific Journal of Marketing and Logistics, vol. 19, no. 1, pp. 75-86.
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