Realisation that online advertisements are misleading: Involvement of middle-aged and older adults with botanical dietary supplements

Yuting Sun, Jianting Zhang and Yixuan Li

Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 2024, vol. 79, issue C

Abstract: This study designed media-rich online botanical dietary supplement advertisements that contained misleading claims and probed factors affecting the purchase intention of mature consumers (middle-aged and older adults). We identified inter-age-group path differences in consumer involvement and purchase intention once the misleading claims in the advertisements had been highlighted. The results indicated the following: (1) Online botanical dietary supplement (BDS) consumption is a rational utilitarian-driven behaviour, with cognitive product involvement playing a dominant role in the decision-making. (2) Cognitive product involvement and affective advertisement involvement positively affect mature consumers’ situational involvement. (3) Situational involvement mediates the effects of product involvement and advertisement involvement on purchase intention; once misleading claims are highlighted to consumers, the consumers place themselves in a specific purchase situation and cautiously evaluate BDS product before consumption. (4) Middle-aged and older adults have different information-processing paths when faced with BDS purchases. Specifically, middle-aged consumers are more capable of identifying misleading information during their decision-making than are older adults; conversely, older-adult consumers are more easily swayed by health-evoking visual cues in advertisements, thus prompting them to purchase the advertised BDSs. Our findings indicate that consumer education is crucial and that consumers must be vigilant against being swayed by misleading advertisements. This study extends the model of consumer involvement and offers educational programmes of identifying misleading claims in advertisements that can be applied in middle-aged and older consumers to improve their risk perception within the context of online Chinese BDS advertisements.

Keywords: Consumer involvement; Botanical dietary supplements; Middle-aged and older consumers; Misleading online advertisement; Purchase intention (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0969698924001280
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:joreco:v:79:y:2024:i:c:s0969698924001280

DOI: 10.1016/j.jretconser.2024.103832

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services is currently edited by Harry Timmermans

More articles in Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().