The moderating role of self-confidence on the relationship between deceptive advertisement and consumer purchase intention.

Abstract

This research investigates the moderating role of consumer self-confidence on the purchase intention of deceptive and non-deceptive advertisements. Therefore, the consumer self- confidence scale of Bearden et al. (2001) have been used. Besides, the moderating role of overconfidence on the purchase intention after seeing deceptive and non-deceptive advertisements has also been investigated. The purchase intention is investigated on four different kinds of advertisements: two monetary (price comparison and bargain offer) and two claim (puffery and semantic confusion) advertisements. The research suggests that only the self-confidence on information acquisition (IA) had a negative moderating role on the purchase intention after seeing deceptive advertisements. The other two aspects of consumer self-confidence, consideration set formation (CSF) and persuasion knowledge (PK), and the overconfidence had no moderating role on the purchase intention after seeing deceptive advertisements. The outcome of this research is that consumers with a high IA have a lower purchase intention after seeing deceptive advertisements than consumers with a low IA. This new insight can help make supermarket advertisements more efficient, which will lead to higher purchase intention of the consumers.