How Unpleasantness Affects Advertising Avoidance as a Behavioral Outcome on the Internet
Authors:   Asia-Europe Perspective Association, Kim Chang-Joong , Jin Chang-Hyun 
Published: June 2018

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between negative social-psychological feelings on the part of consumers and advertising avoidance as a behavioral outcome of consumer activity on the Internet. Although researchers in advertising-related fields have investigated advertising avoidance across a variety of media, from traditional vehicles to new media such as the Internet, most studies of Internet advertising have focused on aspects such as advertising creativity (efficiency of execution, creative strategy factors, media richness, etc.), individual differences (personality factors, consumer experiences, computer skills, etc.), few empirical studies have attempted to investigate the relationship between negative social-psychological feelings experienced by consumers and advertising avoidance. This study seeks to fill this gap in the literature by (a) improving our understanding of how negative emotional states experienced by consumers are related to Internet advertising avoidance, and (b) suggesting a model that can explain the relationship between such unpleasantness and ad avoidance as a behavioral outcome.
To explore negative emotional states experienced by consumers, the study tested the effects of five factors that together form a construct, unpleasantness, representing such a negative emotional state: inconvenience, deception, anti-sociality, compulsion, and intrusiveness.
The population surveyed for this study was selected using convenience samples of Internet users, with almost every participant working in a business-related field or enrolled in college. The purpose of using such a randomly collected sample was to capture representative consumer segments and to avoid the bias of demographically homogeneous samples. Questionnaires were distributed to the public personally by a research assistant. Sample respondents consisted of 194 men and 168 women, with 362 questionnaires being administered to and completed by respondents. The average age of respondents was 25 years. Daily average Internet use on the part of respondents was 3 hours. A total of 362 subjects completed the self-administered survey.
The data collected for this study were analyzed using SPSS 15.0, and covariance structure analysis was conducted using both EQS6b and the MLE (Maximum Likelihood Method). Appropriate procedures for building a structural equation model were conducted, and model goodness of fit, including normality and sample adequacy, was evaluated according to the measurement model suggested by Hair et al. (1998). As seen in Tables 1 and 2, the extracted AVE ranged between .648 and .791, and the means of the squares of the correlation coefficients ranged between .03 and .46, which shows that AVE is larger than the means of the squares of the correlation coefficients (r²). This condition also ensures discriminant validity, which is required for verification of the research hypotheses model.
This study investigated the relationship between negative social-psychological consumer feelings and advertising avoidance. The study examined how several constructs when regarded as components of unpleasantness (inconvenience, deception, anti-sociality, compulsion, and intrusiveness) affect ad avoidance as a behavioral outcome.
The results of the study indicate that unpleasantness, as measured in terms of these five factors, successfully explains why people psychologically avoid advertising on the Internet. Deception and intrusiveness as components of unpleasantness were found to be the most important antecedents to such advertising avoidance. This study provides offers significant findings a valuable cornerstone for in the research of negative emotional feeling toward Internet advertising.