Comparison of the Paths From Consumer Involvement Types To Ad Responses Between Corporate Advertising And Product Advertising

Abstract

The study reported here examines knowledge derived from past work on involvement in product advertising and explores whether consumer involvement works the same way when consumers respond to corporate ads. The use of corporate advertising in the United States has increased, but only limited research has been done to explore the nature of it. The study found key differences between product and corporate ads in terms of ad involvement effects on consumers' attitude/behavioral intentions. In corporate advertising, predispositional involvement influences consumers' ad attitudes and behavioral intentions only when mediated by ad involvement, whereas predispositional involvement has both a direct and an indirect influence on attitude and intentions in product ads. A key implication of this is that creating advertising involvement is even more critical in the corporate advertising setting as compared to product advertising. In explaining the results, the authors posit reasons such differences exist. Also, the results contribute to the debate on potential outcomes of corporate advertising by showing that corporate advertising can lead to increased product purchase intentions for a corporations' products even though the corporate ads are not product-focused.