Mainland Chinese Consumers’ Attitude Toward Social Media Advertising

Along with the development of media technology and the change of media environment,social media advertising,with social media as the main carrier,is becoming a unique and important advertising form.The development of social media advertising will not only reconstruct the whole advertising industry,but also has a profound impact on the study of advertising effects which has long been focused on traditional media advertising.Research on the effect of social media advertising will be the cornerstone of the future research on social media advertising,and it is also a basic subject that worth attention from scholars.In this study,we focused on this basic issue of social media advertising effect,and conducted a large-scale national survey in mainland China(N=4172).Combining knowledge from sociology,psychology,communication,advertising and other disciplines,this study explored the factors that affect social media advertising attitude from the three dimensions of consumer(demographic characteristics,social media use behavior,psychological traits)through five sub-studies,and also systematically analyzed the mechanisms underlying.The results showed that(1)those with a positive attitude towards social media advertising were the "middle group" in terms of demographic characteristics,while those with a negative attitude belong to the "marginal group";(2)from the perspective of social media use behavior,there was an inverted u-shaped relationship between social media use and advertising attitude,with information,entertainment,intrusion and privacy concerns playing an mediating role;(3)from the perspective of consumers’ psychological traits,there was a positive u-shaped relationship between loneliness and social media advertising attitude,with social media use playing a moderating role;(4)from the perspective of social media and social media advertising attributes,informality,entertainment,and self-brand consistency positively influenced consumers’ attitude toward social media advertising;privacy concerns negatively influenced the attitude toward social media advertising;city levels and generation played a moderating role;but the relationship between intrusiveness,quality of life,structured time and consumers’ advertising attitude was non-significant;(5)form the perspective of culture,intrusion did not necessarily affect Chinese consumers’ attitude toward social media advertising,and cultural tightness played a moderating role.The present study is of great theoretical and practical significance in the following aspects:firstly,based on the reality of mainland China,this study clarifies the internal heterogeneity of Chinese consumers and the similarities and differences between Chinese consumers and American consumers;secondly,since most studies have dealt with the"specific" advertising attitude,this study focuses on the "general" social media advertising attitude,thus has broader applicability and stronger theoretical significance;thirdly,by introducing theoretical perspectives from other disciplines,this study proposes a series of new variables and constructs a relatively complete social media advertising attitude model,filling the gap of domestic and foreign studies;fourthly,the U-shaped models of social media advertising attitude found in this study highlights that except for the dominating linear model provided by western academia,there may be a "turning point" in social media advertising attitude,pointing to a new direction that researchers can explore in the future;lastly,from the findings of this research,advertising managers can also understand how social media users perceive the social media advertisement when making advertising decisions.