Avoidance and Acceptance of Native Advertising on Social Media: Applications of Consumer Social Intelligence, Persuasion Knowledge, and the Typology of Consumer Responses

Abstract

Despite its growing popularity and importance, little research has been done to understand what mechanism drives consumers to avoid or accept native advertising on social media. This study applied the ideas of consumer social intelligence, persuasion knowledge (PK), and the typology of consumer response strategy to examine how consumers’ naive theory of persuasion is associated with their evaluation of the persuasion, which in turn relates with sentry-seeker response strategy to native ads on social media. The results of an online survey (n = 503) revealed that consumers’ naive theory about digital advertising is significantly associated with their skepticism but not with perceived fairness. Both skepticism and fairness, however, are interchangeably related to manipulative (irritation and intrusiveness) and cooperative (entertainment and informative value) evaluations to native ads, which in turn have crossover relationships with the sentry (avoidance) and seeker (acceptance) response strategies. Interestingly, consumers’ skepticism was directly and negatively associated with their seeker strategy. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.