| dc.description.abstract | Skepticism toward advertising exists in the market, therefore, competitive market encourages marketers to show their products in the best way, and consequently ads become more exaggerated. Businesses spend millions of dollars on advertising to increase consumers’ positive brand attitude, diminish doubt toward advertisement, and rectify wrong attributions of products every year. Empirical evidences indicate that ad claims are not always accepted and consumers generally distrust ads. Advertisers who cheat or dissemble are maybe punished by consumers through avoiding and disregarding products that do not materialize to their claims. The purpose of this research is to focus on how doubt in advertisements impacts the effectiveness of advertisement, including brand attitude and purchasing intention. Furthermore, we consider the moderating effects of product involvement between skepticism toward advertising and ad effects. Heterogeneous samples may influence the validity of theory prediction due to the difference of sample characteristics. Therefore, this study adopts convenience sampling and students are selected as our subjects. Participants are gathered from undergraduate and graduate students of five universities. This research adopts the SUR model to estimate the parameter, the mutual relationship among several regression equations, which are taken into consideration, because this study assumes that dependent variables (brand attitude and purchase intention) are measured by the same variables, such as skepticism toward advertising and product involvement. There are a total 337 subjects that participated in this experiment, and as pointed out by the verified result, doubt in advertisements has a negative effect on brand attitude and purchasing intention, and this negative effect will disrupt product involvement. The interaction effects between product involvement and skepticism toward advertising are significant correlated with brand attitudes and purchase intentions. Besides, product involvement have positive effects on brand attitudes and purchase intentions. It means that product involvement moderate the relationship between skepticism toward advertising and brand attitudes or purchase intentions. However, skepticism toward advertising has no significant effects on brand attitude and purchase intention when interaction effects are considered. We thought that interaction effects might dilute negative influence from consumers’ skepticism toward advertising on brand attitude and purchase intention. Research results clearly indicate that skepticism toward advertising plays an important role in ad effects. Advertisers have to use exaggerated ads carefully, because the negative effects of skepticism toward advertising not only influence brand attitude and purchase intention but even erode fine reputation built for a long time. In other words, consumers’ skepticism toward advertising will not increase sales, and cause effects which marketers wish not to have. Even if this study has only scratched the surface, it takes the first step for exploring consumers’ response to ads and that still can be a fundamental for other studies.
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