Consumers’ Attitude towards Advertising

Advertising is a growing business and with advances in the Internet technology, the dynamics and landscape of the business has changed as well. Prior findings on consumers’ attitude towards advertising are mixed. This paper is an attempt to examine young adults’ attitude towards advertising. We conceptualized a framework to examine the influence of six independent variables namely consumer manipulation, product information, hedonic/pleasure, economic condition, social integration, and materialism on consumers’ attitude towards advertising. Participants were selected from the southern region of Malaysia. The data were collected through personal administration, and had 217 valid responses. The analysis reveals that four of the six hypotheses were supported. Consumer manipulation emerged negative, which is consistent with past findings. These findings would enable practitioners to be more consumer-sensitive to ensure that the advertising campaigns are properly conceived to avoid adverse effects on a firm’s performance. The findings would also benefit consumers in gaining additional understanding on the roles of social networks in persuading specific purchase. This paper also contributes contextual literature on the perspectives of consumers’ in Malaysia.


Introduction
The emergence of globalization has created more dimensions for researchers to explore the role of advertising in products and services performance including consumers' attitude (Kanso & Nelson, 2007).According to Tai (2007), the advancement of technology enables competitors' easy access to marketing information.Therefore, advertising plays an important role in such situation by developing a strong brand name of the corporation or products.Advertising is a non-personal communication in the structure of information, usually paid for and generally persuasive in nature about products, services or ideas by acknowledged sponsors through an assortment of media (Bovee & Arens, 1992).In general, advertising is used to inform, persuade, and remind consumers.Advertising is believed to enhance buyers' responses to products or services offered by a firm, thus enabling possibilities of increased profitability.However, advertising has been accused of an array of sins ranging from an economic waste to purveying of harmful products, from sexism to deceit and manipulation, from triviality to intellectual and moral pollution (Mittal, 1994).However, descriptions of advertising vary.Previously, Kotler (1988) noted that advertising helps to increase the potential buyers' reactions towards a organization and its offering, accentuating that it seeks to do this by supplying information, channeling desire, and providing reasons for preferring a particular organization's offer.Some might consider this as a strategy to enhance brand loyalty among customers and to attract customers away from competitors (Agrawal, 1996).Morden (1991) stated that advertising is used to create an essential awareness of the product or service in the mentality of the potential customer and to build up knowledge about it.For instance, prior research indicates that in China, 70 per cent of Chinese recognized Coca-Cola brand due to the massive advertisement they encountered (Yan, 2004).Recently, Ha, John, Janda and Muthaly (2011) revealed that spending on advertising is an imperative for firms in order to retain customers.Hence, the purpose of advertising is to create awareness of the advertised product and provide information that will assist the consumer to make informed-purchase decision.The importance of advertising as a promotional strategy, therefore, depends on its capability to influence consumers to not only purchase but to continue to repurchase and eventually develop-brand loyalty.
Many corporations budget large amounts of resources for advertising annually.According to Kanso and Nelson (2007), worldwide expenditures on advertisement were $401.2 billion in year 1997.It then increased to $602 billion in 2006.Unfortunately, some of these corporations did not conduct in-depth research on advertising strategies before they made advertising decisions.Consequently, this created barriers for corporations to achieve the effectiveness of advertising (Tai, 2007).It is critical for advertisers to ensure customers are attracted to the advertising so that customer will be persuaded to purchase the product or service.In addition, it was argued that advertising overrules a consumer's sovereignty of decision-making in the creation of these desires, by offering an unshakable link between products and the fulfillment of desires for them.For instance, Obermiller, Spangenberg and MacLachlan (2005) commented that unbelievable or over-dramatized advertisement tends to irritated consumers.Regardless of the differences of perception and definition of advertising, it is a growing industry and significantly affects our social structure.
According to an advertising report by The Nielson Company (2011), Malaysian advertising industry recorded an increase of 15.8% in 2010 compared with the figure for 2009.This growth was based on various media as listed in Table 1.Newspapers had the highest share of advertising expenditure.In addition, Unilever Malaysia marked the top advertiser in 2010, followed by Procter & Gamble, and Celcom (see Table 2).2010), indicate that young adults (aged between 15-34 years) made up approximately 34% of the Malaysian population, signaling the value of this segment of the population to businesses.According to Arnett (2000), young adults have the power to make decisions.Advertising is a vital medium for them to keep up-to-date with latest products or services.Chan (2006) commented that youth market is important to marketer because of their purchasing power including those of their parents.Hence, it appears appropriate for businesses to target young adults, as they tend to be the growth segment in the market, which may result in possible increased profit for businesses.This study follows prior studies' classification of young adult based on the age brackets: 18-25 (Piggford et al., 2008); 18-35 (Gil, Andre´s & Salinas, 2007), 20-30 (Sheriff & Nagesh, 2007), 13-19 (Chan, 2006).In this study, we targeted young adults aged between 15 to 36 years based on the justifications discussed earlier in this section.Based on the aforementioned, it is valuable to conduct a research on the effect of key factors on the attitude of young adults in Malaysia towards advertising.The paucity of research on advertising integrating these constructs makes it a challenge for individuals to understand the trends and norms in the context.The findings in this paper would enable related advertising agencies to develop more competitive and culture-sensitive advertising strategies and solutions to attract more consumers, particularly on responses of young adults in Malaysia.In addition, this research would be useful to the public as it highlights specific social and economic dimensions of advertising.Consumers would be more equipped with relevant information on the roles of advertising in the economy and the social structure in Malaysia, particularly on deceit, exaggeration, or inappropriate, and misleading information of certain advertisements, which might affect consumers' values and purchase decisions.Lastly, this paper will serve as a frame of reference for researchers in the field, thereby enabling relevant information.

Conceptual Framework
Based on the conceptual framework, six independent variables were developed, and presented in the subsequent section.The conceptual framework was designed with the dependent variable -attitude towards advertisingbeing influenced positively or negatively by the independent variables, based on these conjectures and the arguments to support the conjectures.The independent variables include consumer manipulation, product information, hedonic/pleasure, economic condition, social integration and materialism (see Figure 1).These were developed based on the review of relevant literature.Munusamy and Wong (2007) indicated that consumer manipulation defines when advertising can be seen as intentionally misleading, or more benignly, as not fully informative, insignificant, silly, confusing, and so on.In other words, it causes people to take up destructive habits and tempts ordinary people to purchase products or services that may be considered valueless in the vain attempt to emulate celebrity endorsers or models.Therefore, it could cause a widespread fear that advertisers are messing with consumers' minds-manipulating consumers psychologically into buying things that consumers never needed or planned buying.In a prior study of college students' attitude towards advertising's ethical, economic and social consequences, Beard (2003) found that college students believe strongly that advertising can cause people to buy things that they should otherwise not buy.In addition, another study conducted by Tai (2007) revealed that the messages in advertising were found to be most significant in brand advertising.Hence, the following hypotheses: H1: Consumer manipulation will have a negative influence on attitude towards advertising

Product Information
The product information variable was the focus of much of the debate by economists, and the advocacy justification of advertising rests on its function as a provider of information (Norris, 1984).Calfee and Ringold (1994) reported that advertising provides product information, leading to consumer education.These findings authorize greater marketplace efficiencies such as, more exact matching between consumers' needs and wants and producers' offerings.Apart from creating meanings that relate to the consumer universe of values, goals and expectations, advertising plays a vital role in providing information about products (Freidmann & Zimmer, 1988;Kwan, & Eze, 2012).Product information affects consumers' attitude towards advertising by providing information about product improvement, newly launched products, and so forth.According to an earlier finding by Pearce, Cunningham and Miller (1971, p.2.28), if a new product is advertised in a meticulous setting, or is related to particular people, the consequential attitudes, which consumers may form about it represent how they "come to know" the product or brand.Taylor, Bonner & Dolezal (2002) stated that appeals intended at providing information can be effective in Bulgaria and Romania, given the positive function of product information on general attitudes toward advertising.This, leads to the following hypothesis: H2: Product information will have a positive influence on attitude towards advertising 2.1.3Hedonic / Pleasure According to Petrovici et al. (2007), successful advertisements always include hedonic benefit as this can encourage positive attitude among target consumers.Consumers in Bulgaria appear to be split on the hedonic/pleasure role of advertising, as Petrovici et al. (2007) demonstrated.Some of them find advertising as entertaining, while others are annoyed by the presence of advertising.In addition, consumers in Bulgaria are particularly concerned with the role of advertising in promoting undesirable values and messages.Advertising can serve as a source of entertainment or pleasure (Alwitt & Prabhaker, 1992;Pollay & Mittal, 1993).In other words, the more pleasurable or entertaining the advertising portrays, the more it is favored by consumers.Munusamy and Wong (2007) considered that the experience of advertising could be a pleasure upon exposure or in recollection.Advertisements can be portrayed as an entertainment, which brings pleasure to the viewers that is beautiful to look at, funny or uplifting in their music.Tsang and Tse (2005) reported that the hedonic/pleasure factor is considerably important in effective Web marketing.Therefore, the following hypothesis has been developed: H3: Hedonic / Pleasure will have a positive influence on attitude towards advertising

Economic Condition
Economic condition reflects the viewpoints that advertising accelerates the acceptance of new products, fosters full employment, lowers the average cost of production, promotes a healthy competition between producers to all consumers' benefit, and raises the average standard of living (Belch & Belch, 2007).Generally, a practical use of national resources increases the average standard of living, as Munusamy and Wong (2007) demonstrated.Ozga (1960) developed the foundation for the informative view.In the informative view of advertising, advertising affects demands by transmitting information.As a result, the advertised product faces a more elastic demand.
The elasticity consequence proposes that advertising causes lower prices, an influence, which is reinforced when production scale of economies are present.The informative view embraces further that established firms do not use advertising to deter entry.On the contrary, advertising eases entry, since it is an important approach entrants provide price and quality information to consumers.Pollay and Mittal (1993) reported that consumers who believe that advertising can generate a positive impact on the economy also tend to portray a more positive attitude towards advertising.The preceding analysis leads to the following hypothesis: H4: Good economic conditions will have a positive influence on attitude towards advertising 2.1.5Social Integration Munusamy and Wong (2007) reported that social integration role of advertising means that it presents lifestyle imagery, and its communication goals often indicate a brand image or personality, the representation of typical or idealized users, associated status or prestige, or social reactions to purchase, own and use (Jayasingh & Eze, 2012).The role of advertising in educating children can be viewed as an element of children's socialisation and their social integration in view of formation of role models, aspirations and social images, as Petrovici et al. (2007) demonstrated.In other words, advertisements keep consumers up-to-date with trends and developments in the markets, which advices about what persons like them (the consumers) are buying or using.This analysis leads to the following hypothesis: H5: Social integration will have a positive influence on attitude towards advertising

Materialism
Materialism is a set of belief structures that sees consumption as the route to most, if not all, satisfactions (Munusamy & Wong, 2007).Pollay and Mittal (1993) considered that 57.4% of the respondents to their study agreed that advertising results in making them a materialistic society, which concerns buying and owning things just to show off.Singh and Vij (2007) found that respondents to their study have a moderately negative attitude towards the promotion of materialism through advertising.The consumers blame advertising for making the society purchase a number of products that they do not really need.In addition, majority of the respondents in their study feel that advertising makes people live in a world of fantasy and it results into a materialistic society, which is overly interested in buying and owning possessions.In this 21st century, advertising tends to increase the materialistic hunger in our society by promoting products that they yearn to own as a label of power and status.Hence, the following hypothesis: H6: Materialism will have a positive influence on attitude towards advertising

Questionnaire Design and Data Collection Method
The questionnaire was divided into two parts: Part A and Part B. Part A solicited responses on participants' background and overall knowledge on the subject matter.Part B of the questionnaire consisted of questions on the conceptual variables.Each variable comprised about two to five questions/statements.We used a five-point Likert scale that ranges from 1 = "Strongly Disagree" to 5 = "Strongly Agree".Prior research employed similar measurement (see Haque et al., 2007;Kwek, Tan & Lau, 2010;Lee, 2009;Eze, Tan & Yeo, 2012;Eze, Chin & Lee, 2011).We employed convenience-sampling method to select 255 participants in this study because there was no population frame for the prospective participants (Sekaran, 2003).Munusamy and Wong (2007) used similar method in their research.Subsequently, we distributed the questionnaire to young adults in Malaysia, who were between 15-36 years old.We used personal administration method to collect the data.We chose personal administration method for data collection because it is widely used in surveys of this nature and, particularly it helps in achieving the objectives of this paper (Lee, Eze & Ndubisi, 2011;Eze & Kam, 2001).
Although, this method appears challenging as it involves personal visits to participants, and patience to provide guidance for respondents to complete the survey forms, it is considered very useful in this instance to ensure that we have sufficient data for the analysis.

Pilot Survey
According to Sekaran (2003), the objective of a pilot survey is to measure the face validity and reliability of the survey questionnaire.Wu (2010) provides an example of a related pilot procedure (see also Pebe et al. (2011); Jayasingh, & Eze (2012); Quek, & Eze (2012).We conducted the pilot study by using a group of 30 participants.The suggestions, comments, and critiques from these participants were evaluated and incorporated into the final survey questionnaire.Finally, the revised questionnaires were distributed to respondents.

Data Analysis and Findings
Two hundred and twenty-nine completed questionnaires were returned, which amounted to about 76% response rate.Out of the 229 copies of completed questionnaires, 12 were incomplete, amounting to about 72% valid responses.We used Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) program to process the data for this study.
The next section presents the descriptive and the inferential analysis and results.Table 4 illustrates the demographic profile of the respondents, who participated in this study.Based on the figures in the table, majority of the respondents were female (60.4%) compared with the male respondents, which was 39.6%.In addition, respondents within the age group of 20 to 23 years old emerged with the highest number of participants at 71.9%.In terms of ethnicity, majority of the respondents were Chinese with 81.6% participation.98.6% of the respondents are single compared to those who indicated that they were married (1.4%).The highest number of respondents in terms of education level came from the undergraduates or diploma level category at 78.3%.In addition, most of the respondents (76.5%) earn RM0 to RM500, monthly, which does not account for the stipends from Scholarships and allowances provided by guardians.Majority of the respondents agree that newspaper is the most effective source of advertising (57.1%).In addition, the respondents encounter advertisements 3 to 5 times in a day (36.4%).Lastly, majority of the respondents, (61.8%), indicated neutral response to any encounter of advertisement.).Since all variables (except CM) yielded mean value more than 3, we can conclude that the respondents agree with these factors (PI, H, EC, SI, M) are useful in assessing consumers' attitude towards advertising.In addition, consumer manipulation (CM) yielded a mean value of 2.69, which indicates that the respondents tend to be neutral on the variable.Table 5 also depicts the Cronbach's Alpha values of the independent and dependent variables in this study.Cronbach's Alpha was used to verify the internal consistency of the variable item.Nunnally (1978) indicated that the value for Cronbach's Alpha of 0.7 or higher is considered acceptable.In Table 5, all variables yielded value more than 0.70, except Consumer Manipulation and Economic Condition.The results indicated that the Cronbach's Alpha value for Consumer Manipulation is 0.550 and for Economic Condition is 0.53.Cronbach (1951) stated that a value higher than 0.50 was a satisfactory level of good internal consistency, Therefore, the reliability analysis for all variables in this study are still acceptable.In addition, during factor analysis, items were retained according to the following criteria: (i) factor loadings greater than 0.5 and (ii) no cross-loading of items.In other words, items were dropped where they have a loading of less than 0.5 or where their loadings are greater than 0.5 on two or more factors (King & Teo, 1996;Eze, 2008).As shown in Table 6, the factor loading for each item is greater than 0.50 and loads into its intended construct.According to Field (2009), a key purpose of ANOVA test is to show whether the model is significantly better at predicting the dependent variable or using the means.In Table 9, the F-value (19.014) is large with a small p-value=0.000<0.05.Hence, it can conclude that at least one of the six independent variables can be used to model young adults attitude towards advertising in this study.Based on this outcome, we are unable to suggest that the hypothesis is supported by the data, even though the negative direction confirms our position.

Discussion
Based on the findings in this study, consumer manipulation correlated negatively with attitudes towards advertising, which indicates that negative belief towards consumer manipulation would result in an increase in negative attitudes towards advertising.This finding is consistent with the findings of Munusamy and Wong (2007) who concluded from their study on attitude towards advertising among students at private higher learning institutions in Selangor.The results also indicate that there is a positive effect of product information on attitudes towards advertising with a p-value of 0.001.Petrovici et al. (2007) arrived at similar conclusion in their study on personal uses and perceived social and economic effects of advertising in Bulgaria and Romania.In addition, hypothesis 3 was supported with a p-value of 0.000.This means, this variable is important in designing adverting campaign for businesses, because belief in hedonic/pleasure, tend to generate positive attitudes towards advertising.Tsang and Tse (2005) reached similar conclusion in their study on a hedonic model for effective web marketing: an examination.
Economic condition had a positive influence on attitudes towards advertising with a p-value of 0.000.This finding indicates that there is a significant effect of economic situations in a particular society with respect to consumers' attitude towards advertising.Hence, hypothesis 4 is supported.In addition, Petrovici et al. (2007) reported that consumers in Bulgaria and Romania are more positive towards the economic rather than social effects of advertising.Therefore, it can be concluded that the more positive perception consumers have on economic conditions in a specific society, the higher the chances that they will have positive attitude towards advertising.Based on the analysis, the hypothesis between social integration and attitude towards advertising emerged insignificant with a p-value of 0.525.Following this outcome, hypothesis 5, was not supported.This finding is inconsistent with the findings of Pollay and Mittal (1993), who reported that social integration would have a positive influence on attitude towards advertising.Finally, materialism has a positive influence on attitude towards Advertising with a p-value of 0.031.Munusamy and Wong (2007) reported results consistent with our findings.

Contributions to Research
The findings from this study would assist future researches to obtain additional pieces of information, which were unavailable in previous studies.In addition, researchers who may be interested in conducting similar studies would find this paper useful as it would serve as a frame of reference on the market trends, and market conditions in Malaysia with respect to young adults.Although the percentage of variance explained by the independent variables is low (35.2%), the results indicate that the variables are critical in providing valuable basis for future research.In addition, based on the findings from this study, the advertising agencies will be able to assess the various effects of advertising towards consumers, and the develop ways to compete in the market in order to gain competitive advantage and remain profitable.

Contributions to Practice
As for the society, the findings would help the public to gain some understanding on the positive and negative contents of advertising, which would alter their attitudes towards advertising.Therefore, they would be enlightened to develop a more ethical and wise judgment towards purchasing products without being deceived by specific manipulative contents of advertising.
In addition, the findings in this study would contribute to government agencies' ability in developing a better understanding to enable better education on techniques used by the advertising industry to attract young adults' attention.Therefore, they would be able to take appropriate measures towards any unethical concepts of advertising and filter advertisements, which portray too much violence and sex appeal due to the Malaysian government's policy, which reflect the national objectives of achieving a Malaysian identity, social responsibility and cultural sensitivity, in compliance to the values of Islam, the national religion.

Limitations and Suggestions for Future Studies
One of the limitations of this paper is the low responses.Future research should strive for higher responses, probably about 400 or more responses that are valid.This will enable the application of more robust statistical tools such as Structural Equation Modeling techniques.In addition, future research may also consider including respondents from other states including east Malaysia.This will enable a stronger and a more balanced perspective on the views of the participants on the research issues.In addition, future work may re-evaluate the social integration construct for additional information.The items in the constructs may be increased and revalidate for any possible information to enhance the relevance to future related studies, particularly with respect to increasing the percentage of variance explained.

Figure
Figure 1.Conceptual framework

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. Normal P-P plot of regression standardized residual

Figure 3 .
Figure 3. Summary of results

Table 1 .
Total advertising spending by media for year 2010

Table 2 .
Top 10 advertisers in Malaysia for year 2010

Table 3 .
Summary table of variables definition and sources

Table 3 .
Summary table of variables definition and sources (continued)

Table 5 .
Mean, standard deviation and reliability value for variables Table5presents the mean values, standard deviation values, and the number of items for each variable.For independent variables, Product Information yielded the highest mean (PI=3.87),followed by Hedonic/Pleasure (H=3.53),Economic Condition (EC=3.45),Social Integration (SI=3.43),Materialism (M=3.36), and Consumer Manipulation (CM=2.69

Table 6 .
Factor analysis for each item

Table 7 .
Pearson correlation coefficient matrixTable7reveals the correlation matrix of the conceptual variables.A two-tail test at 0.05 significance level indicates that there are positive relationships among the independent variables and the dependent variable, except for consumer manipulation (CM).Consumer Manipulation (CM) was found to be negatively related to attitude towards advertising, which may have some implications for the first hypothesis as the regression analysis indicates.

Table 8 shows
R=0.593 and R 2 value = 0.352.This means that 35.2% of the variation in Y can be explained by all predictors (or accounted for by) the variation in X.

Table 10 .
Multiple regression analysis (regression coefficients) Table10shows the estimated coefficients where β (constant) is 0.944, β CM is-0.050,β PI is 0.205, β H is 0.242, β EC is 0.183, β SI is 0.036, and β M is 0.097.The positive beta values for all variables (except CM) indicate a positive influence of the independent variables on the dependent variable.Consumer manipulation emerged with a negative beta value, which indicates a negative influence on the attitude towards advertising.Although the direction of the regression coefficient is in line with the hypothesis and the argument we presented earlier, the result however, appears insignificant, because the p-value (0.139) is higher than the 0.05 significance level.