Impact of Advertising Intervention on Consumer’s Brand Attitude and Trust

Abstract

To counter the negative effects of a product-harm crisis, brands hope to capitalize on their equity, and often use advertising as a communication device to regain customers’ lost trust. We study how advertising influences consumers’ brand attitude and brand trust for crisis brand. Most theories assume that the new attitude replaces the former one; but some scholars argue that a new attitude can override, but not replace, the old one, resulting in dual attitudes. They suggest two different evaluations of the same attitude toward the object: an implicit attitude and an explicit attitude. Based on the Dual-Attitude Model, we proposed the research hypotheses that the advertising appeal mode and the advertising penetrating degree would influence consumer’s implicit brand attitude and explicit brand attitude differently; the brand attitude would affect the brand trust. Random sampling and intentional sampling were used with a group of university students, all of whom knew which was the noncrisis milk brand and which milk brand had been affected by the Melamine Events. The sample included 200 students who represented the consumer. They were assigned randomly either to the experimental groups or control group. The sample excluded subjects who omitted items in the explicit brand attitude and brand trust questionnaire and had an error rate of IAT equal to or higher than 20%. All analyses reported here involve the remaining 158 participants. The advertising interventions were used in the experimental groups, but not in the control group. A pretest-posttest design was used for both experimental group and control group. A 2×2 factorial between-subjects design was implemented within the experimental groups. Techniques included in the SPSS statistical package were to analyze the responses of the subjects to the questionnaire and the IAT, specifically ANOVA, and Multiple Regression Analysis. The results of the experiments indicated the following: (a) In the Melamine Events context, the negative implicit attitude to the crisis brand and the positive implicit attitude to the high quality brand were formed by subjects; (b) In some senses, a positive impact on consumer’s implicit brand attitude was made by the advertising intervention, however, a significant impact on consumer’s explicit brand attitude and brand trust was made; (c) Higher positive explicit attitude to crisis brand would be more driven by the high penetrating advertising than by the low penetrating advertising, also, it would be driven more by rational appeal advertising than by emotional appeal advertising. (d) There is an interaction on implicit brand attitude between the advertising penetrating degree and the mode of advertising appeal. (e) Brand trust would be driven by the dual brand attitudes. Base on this study, we suggested the managers of companies that they should use advertising intervention to change consumer’s attitude to the crisis brand reasonably, they should pay attention not only to the explicit brand attitude but also to the implicit brand attitude. Meanwhile, the study suggested that brand managers should master techniques of advertising according to the psychological rules of the consumer.