Doctoral Research

PROPOSED TITLE

PERCEIVED INTERACTIVITY, ATTITUDES AND AVOIDANCE OF SPONSORED POSTS - A THEORETICAL AND EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION OF BLOG READERS

Research area: Marketing

Year Started: 2007

Funding: Warwick Business School Scholarship (First year of study) / Self / WBS Studentship 2009-2010

Brief Introduction:

Blogging has become a part of what Deighton and Kornfeld (2007) describes as a “digital interactive transformation in marketing”. According to them, blogs are the “non-marketing” communication paths, or new traffic lanes not built for the convenience of marketers but for consumers. This has created new and unexpected challenges and at the same time, opportunities for marketers to influence, participates, or even fit in the social world of consumers.

However, despite the profound implication of blogs for marketing communications, it is surprising that there exist very little theoretical and empirical studies, if any, on this emerging social phenomenon. A review of literature reveals that some studies have examined the marketing potential of blogs. However, there is still not sufficient evidence to show that blogs are better or worse than other media concerning their effectiveness as an advertising medium. Businesses are naturally wary of investing in such a new medium when its long-term development prospect remains largely unknown.

Most of the previous studies on blogs have focussed on bloggers and their motivations for blogging (Kumar et al. 2004; Trammell and Keshelashvili 2005). Other studies have focussed on the credibility of blogs as a source of information, especially with reference to news blogs. However, marketing research has not addressed the issue of the motivations that drive consumers to visit blogs nor linked it to the consumer attitudes towards blogs. Furthermore, credibility of blogs that carry sponsored posts, promoting a company, their products and/ or services remain largely under researched.

As such, my research seeks to study the social, technological, and individual factors that influence consumers to accept new products or services like blogs and their attitude towards sponsored posts in blogs.

Reference: Deighton, J. A., & Kornfeld, L. (2007). Digital Interactivity: Unanticipated Consequences for Markets, Marketing and Consumers, viewed at <http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/08-017.pdf>. HBS Working Papers.

What is a blog? Click here to find the answer.

consumer generated advertising

Fig. 1. Emergence of Consumer Generated Advertising in blogs

The line with single dots in between on the top represents traditional advertising whereby an advertising agency works with a company and comes up with an advertising campaign. However, today we see the emergence of a new branch of marketing known as “Consumer Generated Advertising”, which refers to advertising (sponsored content) on Consumer Generated Media - on blogs, wikis and forums.

Here is my conceptual model along with proposed hypotheses: