Advertising plays an important role in educating, promoting, and raising awareness of a company's products and services through traditional media such as television, radio, newspapers, billboards, and magazines, or through the Internet. Persuading potential and target markets to buy products is not easy. Therefore, advertisers decided to use any method to grab the attention of their customers. One of them is that advertisers have produced images or creativity and attractive advertisements expressed in an ideal way rather than a realistic standard, but some advertisements do not seem to be related to the product, affecting dissatisfaction, and receiving a lot of criticism about advertising.
Therefore, this study examines how the unintentional consequence of idealized advertisements affects on the Ads attitude, brand image and purchase intention. Many studies have been conducted on the unintentional consequence of idealized advertising, but most of studies have focused on social comparisons, self-schemas, and male/female' s self-esteem. Based on previous studies, this study was conducted on whether idealized advertisements had a negative impact on Ads Attitude, brand image and purchase intention due to unintentional consequence, and conducted by setting characteristics of consumer as moderating variables.
In this study, a total of 227 questionnaires were used for analysis, excluding 9 questionnaires that were unfaithfully answered by surveyed 236 students at JEONJU University in May 2023. SPSS 27.0 was used for survey analysis, and reliability analysis, exploratory factor analysis, correlation analysis, and Multiple Linear Regression analysis were conducted.
The results of the study showed that idealized advertisements have a negative (-) effect on advertising attitudes. When consumers see idealized advertisements, they react unfavorably to it. Therefore Hypothesis 1 was adopted. Second, it was confirmed that advertising attitude had a positive (+) effect on brand image and purchase intention, and brand image had a positive (+) effect on purchase intention. Therefore hypotheses 2, 3 and 4 were all adopted. Third, the brand image confirmed the effect of advertising attitude on purchase intention as a mediating effect. Hypothesis 5 was therefore adopted. Finally, the moderating effect between idealized advertisements and advertising attitudes was confirmed according to characteristics of consumer. Specifically, it was found that there was no difference between idealized advertisements and Attitude toward to advertising regardless of the level of social connectedness (high/low), which is characteristic of consumers. But on the other hand, it was verified that there is a difference between idealized advertisements and Attitude toward advertising according to the level of self-monitoring (high/low), which is characteristic of consumers. Consumers with higher self-monitoring react more sensitively to idealized advertisements, while consumers with lower self-monitoring react unfavorably to idealized advertisements or act as they express themselves. Therefore Hypothesis 6 was rejected, and Hypothesis 7 was adopted.