New Approach instudying Cultural Impact on Consumers' Attitudes toward Social Media Advertising

Taghipoorreyneh, Mehdi (2017) New Approach instudying Cultural Impact on Consumers' Attitudes toward Social Media Advertising. PhD thesis, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS).

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Abstract

While many agree that culture influences on consumers' attitudes toward social media advertising, the question remains as to how culture exerts this influence. This thesis answers this question by studying culture from inside (emic) and outside (etic). Therefore, this thesis has three main objectives: (1) to examine the procedural character of culture influences and the important role of this procedure in attitude fonnation, (2) to develop a model to assess the direct and indirect impact of the culture on consumers' attitudes toward social media advertising and (3) to develop an indigenous cultural value instrument responsive to the target culture based on combined etic-emic approach. The theoretical bases of the model are the Theory of Reason Action, Value-Attitude-Behavior hierarchical theory and Affect Transfer Hypothesis model. This thesis applied mixed techniques to integrate qualitative and quantitative data to develop an indigenous cultural value instrument responsive to the target culture. In a sequential research design, a three-round Delphi study was conducted among experts to generate a comprehensive list of items related to Malays values as the target culture. The items were tested among 423 Malays to ensure reliability of the instrument. These items, then, were used to examine the relationship between culture (value, symbol and hero) and social media advertising attitudes. The method of Partial Least Square (PLS) was used to test the proposed hypotheses. Data were collected from 318 Malays through selfadministrative questionnaire. Specifically, the analyses show that the relationship between consumers' values and their social advertising attitudes is mediated- first, by symbols and heroes; and second, by cultural advertisements. The results of this study contribute to research on social media advertising, by disentangling the complex influences of culture on social media advertising. In addition, this thesis shows the usefulness of the combined etic-emic approach in advancing our understanding of advertising attitudes. The approach provided a link between indigenous and mainstream psychology to better understand the target culture values and to focus on values which were salient in indigenous culture and silent in a universal scale. The findings offer ideas for advertiser to adapt their advertising contents in different cultures.

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