The effects of television advertisement on consumer purchasing decision a case of washing powder industry in ho chi minh city, vietnam

The effects of television advertisement on consumermaximize the indirect effects on purchase decision through customer positive attitudes.. Keywords: Purchase decision, customer positive

The effects of television advertisement on consumer

maximize the indirect effects on purchase decision through customer positive attitudes

Keywords: Purchase decision, customer positive attitude, TVCs, television commercials

1 Introduction

For ages, brands of the same product that share the same market must always competeseverely to get customers to their side And television commercials, or TVCs, or broadcastedadvertisements via television, have been one of the most powerful and popular tools to do so

In fact, television watching dominates today’s leisure activities, with a daily average of 3 to 4hours reported by past studies (Frey, Benesch & Stutzer, 2007); hence, advertisements on TV

Moreover, TVC is one of the reliable and convenient sources for customers to gain informationabout products and make decisions when shopping In particular, 74.3% of the audiences want

to buy the new brand introduced in the market after watching TVCs and 66.3% of them claimedthat TVCs help them make a better choice while shopping (Ashaduzzaman & Asif-Ur-Rahman,2011)

It is also true for Vietnam, especially Ho Chi Minh city – one of the most populous and activecity in the country With a population of 8.6 million people (December, 2017) and highproportion of household

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television, Ho Chi Minh city makes a substantially potential market for TVCs Knowing that,advertisers in Vietnam allocated 45% of advertising expenditure on TV advertising, compared

to 33% on print ads and the rest on outdoor and radio ads And the amount of funding for thischannel accounted for $800 billion in 2013 and is expected to increase significantly over years

up to 2018 (Nguyen, 2018)

According to the Consumer Buying Process (Jones, 2014), ‘Purchasing decision’ is the laststage prior ‘Purchase’ Purchasing decision, on the other hand, is claimed to be influenced byexternal factors such as advertisements during the stage of Gathering information (Nguyen,2018) Therefore, companies must gain as much purchase decision from customers as possible

to gain success in sale and to maximize their profits This once again emphasizes theimportance of companies advertising effectively via television

2 Literature Review

2.1 Customer Purchase Decision

The term consumer decision generates an image of an individual who is evaluating all theattributes of the products or brands and rationally choosing one to satisfy their need for theminimum cost Many internal and external factors affect consumers’ purchase decisions, whichmakes consumer purchase process a complicated matter There are 5 stages in the process ofdecision making of customers: needs or problems recognition, information search, evaluation

of alternatives, decision making, and evaluation of the decision made (Solomon, Dahl, White,Zaichkowsky & Polegato, 2014)

In other words, to make purchase decision, customers may undertake various forms ofsearch and obtain information from many sources including internal sources and external

sources Internal sources refer to the mental process of researching by memory and experience, which may serve as a basis for the decision process External sources refer to references such as personal family, friends or acquaintances; advertising such as commercials,

sales persons, dealers, displays; mass media; and experiential such as handling, examining,trying goods or services (Munthiu, 2009)

Knowing this, companies spend billions of dollar every year investigating various influences andunderstanding how consumers make decisions to buy products (Solomon, Dahl, White,Zaichkowsky, & Polegato, 2014) There are actually many factors which affect customer purchasedecision, generalized into three categories namely Cultural factors, Social factors, Personal factors,Psychological factors (Hussain, 2017)

It is impossible to take control of all these factors; however, marketers have taken intoaccount several of them For example, up to now, firms have been trying several methods to

do so, from deeply scientific research such as looking at people’s brains to practical practicessuch as gathering customers’ information, tracking Web patterns, tracking positions andstudying people’s habits to develop and send them suitable ads (Solomon, Dahl, White,Zaichkowsky, & Polegato, 2014)

2.2 Customer Positive Attitude

Attitude is simply referred as any knowledge or feelings, either positive or negative, about

an object or an activity Attitude can also be, in a more academic definition, ‘an enduringorganization of motivational, emotional, perceptual and cognitive processes with respect tosome aspect of our environment’ (Carvalho, 2013)

Attitude can be used as a measurement, or an overall evaluation of how a person like ordislike an object, an issue, a person or an action Meanwhile, attitude toward the behavior can

be seen as ‘a person’s general feeling of favorableness or unfavorable-ness for that behavior’

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These two components are found to link with conative component (tendency, intention orinclination) Specifically, conative component is defined as the intent or action component Thisintent refers to the likelihood of brand purchase with measures of behavioral intent, such asintention to search for information or purchase intention This component also refers to theconsumer’s action toward the brand: trial, purchase, adoption, or rejection (Carvalho, 2013).With these three components, attitudes of consumers can be positive in many cases Forexample, Internet advertising seems to generate positive consumer attitudes because Internetadvertising is often thought to be informative and entertaining (Tsang, Ho, & Liang, 2004) Atthe same time, attitudes can also be negative In fact, studies after 1970 provided evidences ofthe unfavorable public attitude toward advertising In particular, one study found that amajority of viewers regarded TV advertising to be seriously misleading (Schlosser, Shavitt, &Kanfer, 1999).

In addition, attitudes tend to be enduring and not likely to change since they are based onpeople’s values and beliefs However, regardless of that characteristic, companies would wanttheir consumers to have positive attitudes rather than negative ones about their offerings(Solomon, Dahl, White, Zaichkowsky & Polegato, 2014)

According to the findings of Isen (1993), consumers who are having positive feelings suchas: happiness, joy, delight, relaxation, inspiration, etc tend to perceive the televisionadvertisements with pleasure and to have better recall of the advertising message as well asthe product feature

Yielding similar results, the author of Schwarz (2001) found that people would send apositive recommendation back if they have comfortable feelings about the target object Goodfeelings also partly push consumers’ persuasion as they boost positive thinking, which makesconsumer make more impulsive decisions (Schwarz, 2001; Gardner, 1985) In contrast,customers who are having negative emotions tend to engage themselves in the behaviors ofswitching brands (Roos, 1999)

From all the above, customer positive attitude can be seen as a considerably crucial factor

in the process of purchase decision making of customers Advertisers should take it intoaccount in order to create such TVCs which can receive positive attitudes from viewers; inother words, they may have succeeded half-way in enhancing customer purchase decision

2.3 Credibility

Credibility depicts a person’s perception of how true a piece of information or news is Itserves as a means for the information receiver to rate the source or transmitter of thecommunication involved In the case of marketing communication, a company or itsrepresentatives are the sources while the consumers are the receivers (Eisend, 2006)

Credibility has been of particular interest of plenty of marketers because it is believed tohave impact on the attitudes, intentions and behaviors of the information receivers Given theknowledge of a robust relationship between attitudes and upcoming behaviors, it is noticeablyimportant for source credibility to be as persuasive as possible (Eisend, 2006)

In initial source credibility research, dimensions of credibility were highlighted, namelycompetence (‘competence’, ‘expertise’, ‘expertness’, ‘knowledge ability’, ‘qualification’, ‘smartdimension’) and trustworthiness ('trustworthiness', 'character', 'personal integrity') (Hovland,Janis & Kelley, 1953; Hovland & Weiss, 1951)

Moreover, the study of Soh, Reid and King (2009) concluded the combination of ‘consumerperception of reliability and usefulness of advertising’, ‘consumer affect toward advertising’,and ‘consumer willingness to rely on advertising for decision making’ Therefore, theadvertisement will be able to introduce the products to consumers only when it can generatetrustworthiness in their mind

2.4 Interest

Interest refers to one’s personal feelings towards a certain brand or a certain type ofproduct advertised (Hosein, 2012) In other word, interest can be a person’s favorite objectslike a book or a movie; and activities like playing a certain sport or listening to a certain genre

of music Past studies also showed that consumers might become interested in acquiring moreinformation after they have become aware of the brand, products or services offered by acompany which appear attractive to them (De Bruyn & Lilien, 2008)

However, whether customer would purchase the product or not, interest simply illustratesthat person’s liking, or positive feeling, about that brand or product (Hosein, 2012)

On the basis of daily life, several studies have found a direct relationship betweencustomers’ interest and their purchase behavior Specifically, most customers would havelimited budget for purchasing goods and services, which makes them majorly depend on theirinterest to buy and consume the products Furthermore, customers’ interest can be used as aneffective predictor of customer purchase behaviors (Yildiz & Dempski, 2012)

One past survey studying 425 people also showed that the factor of interest was the mostinfluential one that can lead to intention and purchase (Karthikeyan & Balamurugan, 2012)

2.5 Length

The length of TVC is the duration of time, usually in second, of which the advertisement wasbroadcasted on TV Two typical length for commercial are 15 seconds and 30 seconds (thesetwo are popular since they can be easily distributed via other channels like YouTube, radio) Atpresent time, there are more various lengths possible to one commercial: 5-second (YouTube),from 3-5 minutes (via a music video) or even longer (in the means of a short story-movie)

It is obvious that a too short commercial may be insufficient to retain itself in the audiences’ orconsumers’ mind; however, if the ad is too long, people would become bored and switch channels toskip the commercial

According to Fabian’s (1986) research, there was a noticeable positive relationship betweenthe length of a commercial and its advertising effectiveness The audience can be allowed withmore change to attend to the TVC given a suitable ad length, which means consumers canlearn and understand advertising message as well as the product information in the mosteffective manners A suitable length of the commercial is also believed to have better ad recallefficiency since it partly eliminates the wear-out phenomenon which is often experienced whenthe ad is too long and the audiences get tired of the ad

In other the words, consumers need to see a commercial made with a fine length Therefore,depending on the purpose of the advertising campaign and the target customers, advertisersshould choose the appropriate length

2.6 Endorsers

One of the well-known strategies to promote a product is to use advertising endorsers Anendorser can be defined as an individual that supports and recommends to the audiencessome certain products, services, brands and behaviors (Stafford, Stafford and Day, 2002;Roozen, 2008)

Endorsers are classified into three principal categories: celebrities, experts and typicalconsumers (Wang, Tokarz & Savage-Dunn, 2002) The term ‘celebrity endorser’ refers to aperson who enjoys public recognition and utilize that recognition to appear in an advertisementwith a product on behalf of it Using celebrities yields a potential benefit of catching attention

of the audiences; however, it also has a higher risk of negative reputation or unwantedscandals related to the personal life of the celebrity (McCracken, 1989; Phan, 2013).Meanwhile, an expertise endorser can be described as a person who possesses superior andprofessional knowledge about the product (Friedman & Friedman, 1979) They are believed tohave credible information

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which is truly helpful to solve the consumer’s problem (Ohanian, 1990) Finally, a typicalconsumer endorser can be understood as an ordinary person with no prior knowledge of theproduct This type of endorsement is meant to reflect the typical experiences and feelings ofconsumers (Friedman & Friedman, 1979).

Each type is believed to play an effective role in various product segments (Wang, Tokarz &Savage-Dunn, 2002) For instance, celebrities can often be found to promote products bearinghigh social risk such as jewelry or cars Experts, on the other hand, are suitable for introducinghigh-performance products such as medicine and professional appliances And typicalconsumers are effective in advertising daily use products such food, beverage or FMCG(Khuong & Nguyen, 2014)

To examine the relative effectiveness of an endorser, CATLEF model is used, which includes

6 variables: Credibility (C), Attractiveness (A), Trustworthiness (T), Likeability (L), Expertise (E)and Familiarity (F) (Roozen, 2008)

2.7 Advertising Message

The advertising message can be simply understood as ‘anything’ the brand, the product orthe company is trying to convey through the advertisement to the consumers, namely thename, logo, slogan, the features of the product, etc It can also be a brief and simple yet catchyslogan, or the touching and meaningful long-whole story that reflects the identity of theproduct of the brand

A good message can easily lead to a good advertisement In other words, advertisingmessage can be defined “as a dominating theme of an ad that motivates consumers toremember the advertisement and purchase the product in the advertisement” (Mueller, 1987).Past research proposed two types of message: positively framed message and negativelyframed message (Grewal, Gotlieb & Marmorstein, 1994) Positively framed messages aredefined as communications that emphasize a brand’s advantages or the potential gains toconsumers in a situation In contrast, the reversed definition is true for negatively framedmessages Advertisers would often prefer if their advertisement conveys positively framedmessages

According to the research of Sofi and Nika (2013), the messages of ads have an impact oncustomer purchase behavior For example, logo can easily be remembered by customers if it isreally impressive while slogan can attract customers and can make the product differentiatefrom others

to consumer as they may feel irritating and intrusive Thus, decision on the repetition of theadverts, accompanied by other decisions like the scheduling of advertisements, the number ofdifferent advertisements to produce and customer’s pretesting of advertisements, should becarefully evaluated

Research showed that the advertisement repetition also has a significant effect on purchasedecision of consumers (Majeed & Razzak, 2011) Specifically, the first display of televisionadvertisement raises the curiosity, the second time leads to an evaluation and in the third timecustomer decide whether to purchase product or not (Krugman, 2000) It was also found theone to three times of repetition are enough for purchasing (Vakratsas & Ambler, 1999)

According to all the dependent and independent factors above, this study proposes the following

Hypotheses:

H 1 : Factors of TVCs positively affect Customer Positive Attitudes.

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H 2 : Factors of TVCs and Customer Positive Attitude positively affect Customer Purchase

Decision

H 3 : The effects of Factors of TVCs on Customer Purchase Decision are mediated by Customer Positive Attitude.

3 Methodology

3.1 Research Design and Data Collection

The focus of this study is to determine which factors have an impact on customer purchasedecision The main method employed to collect data and examine the effects between

variables is the Quantitative approach Questionnaire was built for the survey, which was

designed in the form of print handouts to distribute offline and Google Form to distributeonline Most of the questions included were based on five-point Likert scale which requirerespondents to rate the given items on the scale of five points from ‘1’ indicating ‘stronglydisagree’ and ‘5’ indicating ‘strongly agree’

Target audiences of this survey are the target customers of washing powder productsnamely OMO, Ariel, Aba, Attack, Tide, Surf, Vi Dan and My Hao In this case, the respondentschosen will be female customers, aged from 18 to 60+, living in Ho Chi Minh city Conveniencesampling was applied and carried out at private households where housewives wereinterviewed and public places such as universities, offices and coffee shops where femaleadults were surveyed In the end, the sample population collected was 314 respondents, which

is a suitable size according to Comrey & Lee (1992)

3.2 Factor Analysis and Reliability Test

Two Exploratory Factor Analyses (EFA) were carried out for two groups of variables, one

group of 7 independent variables and one group of 2 dependent variables The principalcomponent extraction method and varimax rotation were conducted to determine the

relationship among variables Descriptive Statistics were also used to illustrate the demographic data as well as other variables in the research model Moreover, Multiple Regressions were utilized to find out the impacts of the independent variables (music, credibility, endorsers, interest, advertising message, repetition, length) on the dependent

variables (customer positive attitude, customer purchase decision)

The results of EFAs indicate that the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) measure of sampling

adequacy was 0.857 for the independent variables and 0.855 for the dependent variables.According to Tababachnick & Fidell, the KMO index ranges from 0 to 1 and the minimum valuefor an acceptable factor analysis is 0.6, which means the data collected was suitable for furtheranalysis

At the same time, the Bartlett’s Test was conducted and the factor analysis was consideredappropriate when significant ≤ 0.05 (Tababachnick & Fidell)

TABLE I: SUMMARY OF INDEPENDENT VARIABLES

Given Names Number of Items Cronbach’s Alpha