Influence of Attitude towards Advertisement on Purchase Intention: Exploring the Mediating Role of Attitude towards Brand Using SEM Approach

IntroductionIn the present era when companies are facing extreme competition in the market, advertisement has become one of the best ways to reach the consumers and promote their products. According to Kotler and Armstrong (2010), "Advertising is a paid form of non-personal presentation and promotion of ideas, goods, or services by an identified sponsor. " Big corporations are spending huge amounts of money on advertising so as to inform the consumers about their products and persuade them to buy their products. As a result, consumers are bombarded with a number of advertisements on TV, newspapers, magazines, billboards, social media, etc.Advertisement has many objectives to accomplish. According to Cox (2010), quoted in Ranjbarian et al. (2011), "The main objective of advertising is usually to change or influence attitudes. It aims to persuade people to buy product A instead of product B, or to promote the habit of continuing to buy product A. "The term attitude comes from the Latin words apto (aptitude or fitness) and acto (posture of the body), meaning to do or to act (Cacioppo et al., 1994, p. 261). According to Schiffman and Kanuk (2007), "An attitude is a learned predisposition to behave in a consistently favorable or unfavorable way with respect to a given object" (p. 258). Fishbein and Ajzen (1975) define attitude as "a function of one's salient belief at a given point of time" (p. 222) where salient beliefs are those called upon during a particular situation. The first attempt to measure this latent construct, i.e., attitude (as reported by Cacioppo et al., 1994, p. 261) was made by Louis Thurstone when he wrote his seminal paper "Attitude Can Be Measured" in 1928. This precipitated empirical research on the determination of attitudes. Thurstone conceived of attitude as the net affective perception of (i.e. feelings towards) a stimulus rather than as a bodily orientation (Cacioppo et al., 1994, p. 261). Attitude plays a dominant role in the purchase decision of consumers and also helps them to decide if an emerging trend will be lost or not (Batra et al., 1996). Marketers use all the possible ways to convenience consumers to form favorable attitude towards their product. Use of celebrity has been found to be one of the most popular means to influence consumer's attitude towards the product. Atkin and Block (1983) in their study found that celebrity endorser evokes more favorable attitude towards the ad, brand and purchase intention than non-celebrity ones. Comparative advertising is also a well-known tool companies use to persuade consumers that their product is better than their competitors? The present study tries to investigate the consumer's reaction towards these advertisements and its behavioral implication.Literature ReviewPrevious studies have referred to attitude towards specific dimensions such as attitude towards advertiser, attitude towards advertisement and attitude towards brand (Lutz, 1985; as quoted by Wahid and Ahmed, 2011). This study focuses on consumer's attitude towards advertisement and attitude towards brand.Relationship Among Attitude Towards Advertisement, Attitude Towards Brand and Purchase IntentionAttitude towards advertisement has been defined as a predisposition to respond in a favorable or unfavorable manner to a particular advertising stimulus during particular exposure situation (Mackenzie et al., 1986; Burke and Edell, 1989; Biehal et al., 1992; and Wahid and Ahmed, 2011). Consumers' attitudes toward an ad have offered a critical theoretical construct since 1981 (Christian et al., 2014, p. 87), with the publication of two influential papers, Mitchell and Olson (1981) and Shimp (1981). As cited by Ranjbarian et al. (2011) "Attitude toward brand is defined as favorable or unfavorable feelings and beliefs about brand. Brand beliefs and feelings are formed through advertising. These beliefs affect attitudes toward ads and consequently attitudes toward the brands being advertised (Chae and Yi, 2006)". …