Behavioral response of users to Internet advertising, explaining the role of trust and attitude to Internet advertising

Dissertation of Master's course in business management

Abstract

In today's era, following the advancement of technology and information, the competition between businesses has also intensified. It is very important how to present brands, products or services in order to attract the attention of consumers and highlight their distinctiveness so that people are attracted to them or have the desire to buy them. In addition, with the innovations in technology and the development of the Internet, e-commerce has become very prosperous. Considering this, advertising, especially on the Internet, is an important and influential factor in e-commerce. In this way, the present research has addressed the issue of users' behavioral response to internet advertisements: explaining the role of trust and attitude towards internet advertisements. The statistical population of this research is all Iranian virtual community users and the sample size is 385 people. Sampling was done by available method. All research data were collected through questionnaires. Cronbach's alpha test was used to measure the validity of the questionnaire, and the AVE index was used to check the validity of the construct, which indicated that the questionnaire had adequate validity. Data analysis was done at two levels of descriptive and inferential statistics using SPSS 16 and Warp PLS 3 software. The results showed that there is a positive and significant relationship between attitude towards internet advertising and trust in internet advertising. Also, there is a positive and significant relationship between trust in internet advertisements and advertisement clicks, advertisement clicks and internet shopping. However, no links were found between the attitude towards internet ads and the clicks of ads. Based on the results of the research, it is suggested that by controlling the variables influencing the attitude towards internet advertising and creating a more positive attitude towards it, the trust of customers will be increased so that the interest in clicking to see internet ads will increase and in this way the amount of online shopping which usually costs less for companies and customers will also increase.

Keyword

Electronic commerce, internet advertising, behavioral response of users, trust in internet advertising, attitude towards internet advertising

Introduction

Today, with the increasing expansion of the Internet in the world, the number of Internet users is growing. This has created a high potential for e-commerce, so companies are forced to carry out business activities through the Internet.

Advertising is always one of the important areas in marketing and business world. Among the various Internet marketing methods, Internet advertising is one of the most widely used (Cutler et al. [1], 2012).  

In the field of internet advertising, the attitude towards advertising is very important. Attitude is one of the most important concepts in information systems and marketing research. In recent years, this variable has received much attention. But the variable of trust in internet advertising has not been studied much by researchers and most of the research is in the field of trust in e-commerce. This is while the issue of trust in advertisements is itself a determining factor for creating a behavioral response in customers. Also, in the field of behavioral response, advertising clicks and internet shopping as two behavioral response variables have the ability to be investigated separately.

The present research seeks to investigate the behavioral response of users to internet advertisements by explaining the role of trust and attitude towards internet advertisements. Therefore, in this chapter, briefly and according to the subject of the research, the necessity and importance of conducting the research and stating the problem will be discussed first, and then the territory, goals, questions and hypotheses of the research will be stated. In the following, the conceptual and operational definition of the research variables is also mentioned.

Importance of the topic

In recent years, despite the widespread use of the Internet, Internet advertising has not faced much development. One of the reasons for this lack of development is users' lack of trust in internet advertising. This is despite the fact that today, most business units pay attention to virtual markets in order to fully exploit their capabilities and reach global customers (Bivillian and Tiger [2], 2013). Therefore, improving and increasing the effectiveness of advertising has become one of the concerns of companies and institutions active in cyber space..  One of the ways to improve and increase this effectiveness is to gain customers' trust in internet advertising. It seems that by changing the attitude of customers towards internet advertisements, it is possible to increase the trust of customers in advertisements (Jiang et al.[3], 2013).

Besides these factors, it is very important to understand the behavioral response of consumers because the behavioral response plays a significant role in the purchasing behavior of consumers. The behavioral response can be considered in the form of two dimensions of online shopping and advertising clicks (Anormir [4], 2012). Nowadays, the number of consumers who use the Internet platform for shopping is increasing rapidly. Online shopping provides a wide selection of opportunities and more and easier access to information. Shopping on the Internet allows users to compare products and services globally (Cheng et al. [5], 2013). In addition to online shopping, advertising clicks are also another dimension of behavioral response, strongly based on performance, and at the same time, it is used as an important indicator to examine consumers' behavioral responses to internet advertising. In fact, this behavioral variable can measure the effectiveness of internet advertising (Anormir, 2012).  

Statement of the problem

Marketing communication includes various components such as: sales promotion, public relations, direct marketing and advertising [6] that advertising is an important part of marketing, especially electronic marketing (Strauss and Frost [7], 2001), so that nowadays companies spend huge amounts of money on electronic advertising due to the vital role of advertising in informing customers and encouraging customers to buy (Abassi and Mohammadian, 1386).

The emergence of the Internet is one of the biggest technological changes in the history of the world, this emergence has had a profound impact on the daily lives of people all over the world (Bivillian and Tiger, 2013). Recent statistics have shown that more than 2.4 billion people, about a third of the world's population, use the Internet (World Internet Statistics[8], 2013). Access to the Internet has made people's lives easier, because almost everything can be accessed online, regardless of time and place. Since the Internet has attracted many users, companies and marketers tend to advertise their products and services in this way (Bivilian and Tiger, 2013).

Internet advertising [10] is a method to spread as much information as possible to influence buyers and business transactions in the web environment. Schlozer et al.[11] (1999) consider internet advertising as any type of content and commercial content available on the Internet that companies design to inform consumers about their goods and services. Currently, Internet advertising is considered a big business: Internet advertising revenue in America reached 36.6 billion dollars in 2012, which shows a 15% increase in advertising compared to 2011. Mobile advertising revenue as a part of internet advertising has grown by 111%, from 1.6 billion dollars in 2011 to 3.4 billion dollars in 2012 (Advertising Revenue Report [12], 2012).

Various organizations, in turn, want to use as much space as possible on the Internet platform. On the other hand, consumers who have different views and attitudes towards online business and advertising are facing a lack of trust (Tahiri Ravizi, 2013).

One of the most effective theories in marketing research is the attitude towards advertising [13] (Brenner and Kumar[14], 2000; Bihal et al.[15], 2004; McKenzie et al.[16], 1989). Attitude towards advertising is the context for responding to a specific advertising stimulus, favorably or unfavorably, during a specific display situation (Behal et al., 2004). In fact, it can be said that the consumer's attitude towards advertisements reflects the effectiveness of advertisements [17]. It is expected that the positive attitude of consumers towards advertisements will lead to the recall of the brand shown in advertisements and affect the behavioral response[18] of people (Mehta[19], 2000).

Behavioral responses are related to the set of activities that users express during or after their interaction with the external environment (Teng et al.[20], 2011).