HOW DO GREEN FIRMS APPEAL USERS WITH POP-UPS AND IN-LINE AD`S AS AN EFFECTIVE TOOL TO DISTORT THEIR ATTITUDE.(A STUDY OF HOW GREEN FIRMS USE ADS AS AN EFFECTIVE TOOLS TO APPEAL TO USERS)

AUTHOR & PRESENTER: DANIEL LAMECK

CO-AUTHOR : DR. . YING-JIUN HSIEH

AFFILIATION: NATIONAL CHUNG HSING UNIVERSITY

CONFERENCE: SIBR-THAMMASAT 2014 BANGKOK CONFERENCE ON INTERDISCIPLINARY BUSINESS & ECONOMICS RESEARCH

ABSTRACTThe internet industry makes a distinction between rich media pop-ups

and in-line ad`s marketing to offer great opportunities for green advertising and marketing activities supported by website advertising to allow green firms to directly convey messages to the consumers.

The aim of this study is to explore

why and how internet advertising will have impact on consumers attitudes by deploying pop-ups and in-line ads.

a) Find differences between the way Taiwanese consumers react to advertising with green advertising messages.

b) to explore why current methods of internet advertising are becoming inadequate

c) to explore what technologies are allowing changes to occur.

INTRODUCTIONWhy are FIRMS using GREEN MARKETING strategy to integrate with internet

platform? And why employing pop ups/in-line ads?

• They create as much clutter as those slippery advertising inserts that fatten yahoo or google search engines?

• But just how annoying are those pop-up/in-line ads that appear unwanted on your computer screen as you cruise the Internet?

• How effective are they at selling stuff on websites?

• And do they raise privacy issues in the same way that e-mail spam does?

There is not enough research to measure the effectiveness of these platforms.

Previous studies shows that pop-up ads/in-line ads are way at the bottom of the list in terms of popularity

ATTITUDE In a psychological sense attitude is defined as a “tendency that is

expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor" (Eagly and Chaiken, 1993, p. 1).

The dictionary defines it also as “a cognitive process involving positive or negative valences, feelings, or emotions” (marketngpower.com).

The attitude is an important part in the study of consumer behavior and considered with Green firms for marketing strategies.

As the consumption of green product is a current and relevant subject, many studies have been done about the attitudes towards green products but yet didn’t integrate with media used to convey the message to consumers and this study will contribute to the literature about pop-ups and in-line advertisements with message on green products.

ADVERTISING VALUE

The advertising value is affected by the five factors,

Demographic, entertainment, informativeness, irritation and credibility.

Attitude and emotion should not be regarded as factors like the other since are dependent on the values of the other five factors.

Advertising value can be defined through a subjective evaluation of the relative worth or utility of the advertisements to consumers (Ducoffe, 1995).

• Advertising value relates to the question: “What do I want to receive from the advertisement?”.

ADVERTISING LITERATURE

• Green advertising is here understood as the promotion of a product or brand that has environmental claims.

• It is advertising which addresses the relationship between the product and the biophysical environment as well as the medium deployed to channel the message content.

• When firms have defined the goals and objectives and which target group and market position that has to be defended, they have to decide on which tools to use of the marketing plan.

CONT.

• Several types of promotional tools are available online one of them are online web advertising. The most commonly studied are pop-ups and in-line ads, which are ads embedded in the page being viewed.

• The defining characteristic of this class of promotional messages (especially when compared to banner ads) is the difficulty the web surfer has ignoring them. These promotional messages are designed to attract attention and interrupt the user’s experience at the website.

• Therefore, in this particular study, we highlight some research that has been conducted in both the marketing and green advertising literature with respect to online consumer behavior and promotions as well as in the decision-processes literature with respect to task interruption and attitude.

• Green firms in Taiwan are facing a constant battle to break through the consumer attitudes and reach the consumers’ attention with their advertising.

• Ads appear daily and everywhere in a consumers’ life; Advertising theorists have been describing the critical stimulus features of various advertising media and their content.

• The competition for attention has become massive and companies are using all means necessary to reach the attention of the consumers (Rodgers and Thorson, 2000).

• For instance, (Carlson et al. 1996) analyzed green advertisements in the scope of ‘integrated marketing communication’ by using content analysis .

• They classified advertisements by the types of claim into four categories: product orientation, process orientation, image orientation and environmental claim but study didn’t focus on attitude distortion and impact of green ads

RESEARCH FRAMEWORK

• Extension of Ducoffe (1996) model

Based on the existing literature about attitudes toward advertising and consumer behavior models, a research framework is constructed to illustrate the factors that can distort consumer attitudes.

It’s also known that the constructs being expressed in previous studies by Brackett and Carr (2001) and Ducoffe (1996) have proven to be relevant, the distinction between advertising value and advertising attitude is not exposed clearly.

One of the things marketers are concerned with is how persuasion works and how people judge the tactics used by persuaders and whether those tactics are appropriate.

FIG.1

We use attitude and emotion as a dependent variables and consider the antecedents of green ads value as a factor of attitude in our framework.

We also believe that there are more factors that come into play, especially in the internet environment.

These factors may help further distinguish the internet environment from traditional media.

This paper examines the following two factors in addition to those proposed by Ducoffe (1996) and further validated by Brackett and Carr (2001)

Hypotheses authors developed from the framework

1) The perceived emotion, entertainment, informativeness, irritation, credibility and demographics of internet ads affect the attitude toward internet advertising.

2) Consumer attitudes are different for ads content with green message content and general internet advertising.

3) Attitudes toward green advertising affect consumer intentions to receive pop-ups and in-line ads.

4) Consumers’ intentions to click and visit pop-ups and in-line ads with green message content affect their attitudes towards the brand appealing

CONT.

In the context of consumers interacting with an ad, the importance or relevance of the ad to consumers current information needs would determine how involved a consumer is, which in turn would affect his or her perception of the ads value.

This is in line with the discussion of a consumers cognitive or affective needs (also called psychological motives) such as information learning, entertainment, personal identity, parasocial interaction, companionship and escape (Blumler, 1979; Katz et al, 1974; Rubin, 1981; 1983).

All advertising is an imprecise science. No one knows with any degree of consistency how well any ads increase the sales of products and services.

Sometimes they help; sometimes they don’t. The better ones can create a nice positive buzz; the poorer ones can be embarrassing.

METHODOLOGY

• The study involved combination of a descriptive and explanatory approach based on a quantitative nature.

• Quantitative research

Is “the collection of data that involves larger, more respondent’s samples and numerical calculation of results”.

As looking deep to consumer attitude, a quantitative strategy is more suitable to include a large sample size, because it can be analyzed accurately through inferential statistics that will confirm the approval or disapproval of selected hypotheses and the result generated can be real and unbiased.

DATA ANALYSIS AND FINDINGS

• Data Reliability

The attitude data were first tested for reliability using Cronbach’s alpha to assess data reliability.

As most research method guides treat a value higher than 0.7 as acceptable [W.C. Multivariate Data Analysis.], the values in data collected from the survey are reliable and suitable for further analysis.

• Factors Affecting Attitudes

The results indicate that entertainment is the major factor that affects the overall attitude, with a marginal contribution of higher percent of the variance.

Credibility is the second important attribute, but its marginal contribution to explain the variance is only slightly lower percent, which is substantially lower than that of entertainment.

Irritation and informativeness have marginal contributions compare to the other two.

Demographics considered to be dimension of age was not only chosen in order to filter out unsuitable respondents from suitable ones, but also to provide an explanation to varying attitudes toward advertising.

Relationship Between Attitudes and Emotion.

A multivariate analysis indicates that overall attitude is significantly correlated to emotion (t = 11.3, p < 0.001). When the respondents were asked about their willingness to receive pop-ups and in-line advertising if certain rewards, such as environmental concern , the answers range differed in just a small margin” A chi-square test between these two factors is statistically significant at p < 0.001.

6. CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATION

• . At the same time they agreed that the strategy used for advertisements is very informative, modern advertising strategy, but still these advertisements creates irritation and annoyance although same advertisements have interactivity sense. Authors found that respondents are very impressed with green message but with a wee bit about the medium used by green firms, there is a need to improve their advertising strategy.

6.1 SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH

• 1. With an increase in size of the studied population, the authors believe would generate more reliable results, and potentially indicate more visible differences

• 2. Examining attitudes held toward a specific green product, or for instance green products found in a particular industry. Also, look at adverts found in different media, to examine differences in perception of green appeals.

• 3. Create adverts and display as pop-up or in-line, deciding what to be included. This would mean that the viewers of the ad would have no previous perceptions or attitude held toward the ad, or the brand. This could provide interesting results, indicating findings with no risk of previous perceptions influencing the attitudes