Unboxing the Black Box: Demystifying the Impact of Consumers’ Psychological Motivations on Their Perception of Online Advertising

Abstract

In a quest to reap the potential of the internet as an advertising media, marketers are increasing the share of online advertising in their promotion mix. But very less is known about factors impacting the consumers’ perception of online advertising. Psychological factors play an important role in developing the consumers perception, the present study extends the concept in the domain of online advertising. For this, the present study has developed a hypothesized model containing two layers. Layer one consists of a conceptual framework based on the literature review and second layer comprised of testing the relationships between consumers psychological motivations and their perception of online advertising. For the purpose, information, convenience, entertainment and social interaction are considered as psychological motivations of using the internet. The consumers’ perception of online advertising has been measured in terms of information value, entertainment value, trustworthiness, offensiveness and incentives. A purposive survey was conducted in Delhi NCR and the data was analysed using SEM in SAS Proc Calis (9). The findings suggest that psychological motivations of using the internet significantly impact the consumers’ perception of online advertising.