Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• DeFronzo, Ryan F

Titel

The Impact of Promoting Icons, Logos, and Third-party Endorsements in Advertising on Consumer Response: Three Essays

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

2024

Link zum Volltext

• ProQuest

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Consumers are increasingly exposed to a myriad of marketing cues signaling information such as a brand’s history, its accessibility online, context about the firm’s owners, and assurances of whether the brand’s products were produced and sourced within an ethical process. Accordingly, this research examines the role of leveraging different logos, icons, and third-party endorsements on consumers’ attitudes, purchase plans, and prosocial behavior intentions in the context of product advertisements.Essay one investigates whether heritage brands that promote social media platform logos alongside their founding dates are seen as more relevant or inauthentic to their longstanding tradition and history. Specifically, it is tested whether relevance theory or construal level theory is a better explainer for the effect. Further, the roles of consumers’ temporal orientation and product involvement are investigated to better inform where and when it may be more or less practically desirable to pair symbolically old heritage claims with social media cues, which connate contemporariness.In essay two, the role of promoting certified minority owned logos in advertisements is investigated in the context of women, ethnic minority, and LGBT entrepreneurs. Specifically, drawing on social identity and homophily theories, it is anticipated that featuring the cues in ads to consumers who share similar characteristics to the minority business owner will bolster attitudes and purchase support for the brand, yet this may attenuated among politically conservative shoppers (vs. democrats). Further, the role of product involvement is also explored to provide further guidance to minority entrepreneurs and the third-party certifying organizations on the optimal product types and segments to advertise the minority credential.Finally, the third essay tests the explanatory and predictive capacity of moral licensing theory in the context of source credibility cues informing consumers that a product they may be likely to purchase was produced or sourced ethically. Testing multiple ethical production cues (i.e., FairTrade, FairTrade America, FairTrade Africa, the Rainforest Alliance, and PETA cruelty free), following moral licensing theory, it is predicted that consumers will be less likely to report high prosocial behavior intentions toward close others when the cue is present. Yet, in the presence of high psychological distance (i.e., FairTrade Africa among American consumers), the effect is expected to be attenuated because the high mental construal may interfere with the moral license. On the other hand, it is hypothesized that the effects are bolstered among low involvement products, where consumers tend to focus more on peripheral cues.Nuanced findings across the three essays provide important contributions to the marketing literature, and valuable insights for heritage brand marketers, minority entrepreneurs, and managers of brands where social responsibility is central to its strategy.