The impact of consumer-generated advertising on corporate reputation and brand image: The issue of source effects

This dissertation focuses on consumer-generated advertising (CGA) as a type of co-creative practice through which consumers take on the role of the advertiser and create ads for various products and services. The purpose of this research is to develop an understanding of how consumers evaluate CGAs (i.e., CGA that are solicited by companies and CGA that are not solicited by companies) vis-a-vis traditional ads and how their evaluations influence corporate reputation and brand image. This study also raises the question of credibility of co-created content and aims to provide an understanding of communication value of CGAs by investigating consumers' perceptions of the source(s) of CGAs and the ways in which the perceived characteristics of the source(s) shape their reactions. Adopting a qualitative research approach, I use a combination of netnography and in-depth interviews to collect data from online consumer sites, consumers, and company executives. The findings reveal the complexity of consumers' perceptions of CGAs and demonstrate that they are not more persuasive simply by being consumer created. This research makes theoretical contributions to the co-creation, source effects, persuasion knowledge, and corporate identity and reputation literatures. It also provides managerial insights into how different types of advertising may contribute to, or detract from, the intended corporate and brand images.