AI Summary & Key Takeaways
AI InsightBy understanding how consumers' self-concepts reflect on their consumption preferences in the field of advertising, products and services can be explained to consumers with more effective strategies.
📌 3 Key Takeaways
Abstract
Brands use self-concept as an emotional appeal in their advertisements. Therefore, it is important to explore the influence of self on advertising engagement. The aim of this study is to find out which of the self types, the actual self and the ideal self, results in higher engagement when actual self and ideal self are an appeal element in advertising, and to examine the moderating effect of self-esteem, self-monitoring and social desirability and the mediating effect of psychological well-being in this effect. Within the scope of the purpose of the study, a between-subjects experimental design with random assignment to conditions was employed within the quantitative research approach. Two advertisements, one with actual self stimulus and one with ideal self stimulus, were designed as videos. 470 of the 920 participants were randomly assigned to actual self stimulus and 450 to the ideal self stimulus. Confirmatory factor analysis, correlation analysis, one-way ANOVA and moderated mediation (Hayes Model 14) analyses with the SPSS PROCESS macro were performed for the data collected from the participants. As a result, the actual self was more effective on ad engagement in terms of direct effect, whereas the ideal self was more effective through the mediation of psychological well-being; this indirect effect was moderated by self-monitoring and social desirability, while it remained significant at all levels of self-esteem, which did not moderate the indirect effect. By understanding how consumers' self-concepts reflect on their consumption preferences in the field of advertising, products and services can be explained to consumers with more effective strategies.