Effects of Compulsive Buying Tendencies on Attitudes toward Advertising: The Moderating Role of Exposure to TV Commercials and TV Shows

Abstract

Since its introduction, television content has had important effect on the way we behave and think. Using samples from two countries (the U.S. and Korea), the present study investigates the effects of compulsive buying tendencies on attitudes toward advertising. The results suggest that audiences' compulsive buying tendencies create negative attitudes toward advertising in the two nations. Our findings also suggest that heavy exposure to television commercials and television shows significantly reduces negative attitudes toward advertising invoked by audiences' compulsive buying tendencies in Korea, but not in the U.S. These results indicate that advertising practitioners and scholars should consider relationships between the macro level of cultural variation and the micro level of individual psychological differences (i.e., compulsive buying tendencies). Specifically, we find that compulsive buying tendency plays an important intervening role in some cultivation effects of mass media and advertising.