CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background to the Study
Business organisations consider advertising to be one of the most important and effective promotional instruments to reach customers. Advertising helps to give more information, persuades, reminds, corrects false impressions and convinces as well as creates a brand image for buyers of a product or service. Not surprisingly, advertising expenditures has shown astronomical growth in recent years. Advertising has been gaining greater importance in the marketing of goods and services by both the industrial and non- industrialized nations. It is rather considered more as an investment than expenditure. The purpose of advertising has been ever changing at a rapid pace with diversifications and dynamism. The general public regard advertising according to their desires, expectation and opportunities. Thus, advertising is now therefore regarded as a primary business activity, and has however come to be accepted as a supportive service and a contributory input for diversified growth. The goals of advertising have been changed, modified, adjusted and re-defined over the years in Nigeria.
In a bid to be successful in this competitive market of today, producers and suppliers are now working out various business opportunities and strategies for their products. One such tactics of business, the advertising encourages consumers to try a new brand or a brand they have not tried before. Also, advertising helps consumers to buy more quantity of the product category, than they would otherwise have bought before. If these advertisements can create response among the consumers, then the producers can grab the market (Pongiannan & Jayakumar, 2014). Effective communication through advertisement leads the consumers towards the purchasing of brands (Blech and Blech, 2001) Kotler , Keller and Koshy (2009) stated that ,advertising is the best known and most widely discussed form of promotion because of persuasiveness; it can create brand image instill preference among consumers.
In buying, consumer behaviour is mostly influenced by a number of factors which include culture, family and brand image. On the other hand, brand awareness that is celebrity endorsement of the product also helps the customer to buy the product. Advertisement helps the company to create the awareness in their customers and ingredients the advertisements shape the perception of the customers either in the positive or in a negative way. People know how quality the products are from gathering of information through advertisements. The perception of the quality, awareness of the product and consumer opinion drives the consumer buying decision (Samar & Samreen, 2015).
Advertising is no doubt a marketing concept that helps to influence the buying behaviour of consumers. Whereas consumer behavior is the process and activity by which people select, purchase, evaluate and consume the product or service to satisfy the need or want. In olden times marketers used different signs and symbols to market their products and also to create awareness for the customers. With the advancement and technology development now organizations focus to use print and electronic media excessively. Use of different marketing promotional strategies has been identified as an effective tool of creating awareness among the consumer population. Among them is popular celebrity attachment with the particular brand (Ali , 2015).
As the economic, social, cultural, political and business environment of Nigeria has been changing tremendously, there has been a significant change in the attitude of the people towards advertising. There has been a considerable increase in sales promotion activities of incentive merchandising schemes which have increased considerably in the last decade. The parameters for judging advertising have witnessed a sharp change in Nigeria and the quality and performance of advertising agencies in our country have also improved. Gradually, advertising has been maturing itself as a profession in the country. This has influenced significantly the psychology, sociology and economics of the advertiser, the agency and the media. Thus, advertising in Nigeria, which was considered as an unnecessary evil during the 1960’s, had become a necessary evil by 1980’s and is now being viewed as an absolute necessary. Advertising if used at the right time and in an effective way can lead to the creation of awareness about a product and service and very importantly, create and build a brand. This study will focus on identifying the influence of emotional appeal advertisement on purchase intention with special reference to cosmetic products category.
1.2 Statement of the Problem
Despite the fact that analyzing the impact of a company’s advertisement effort on consumer behaviour is very important, there are very few studies illustrated the impact of advertisements on behavior of consumers (Hafi, 2014). On top of this in the process of the researcher’s effort to find related researches it is found out that there are many researches which shows the influence or impact of advertising source factor and/ or message appeal on consumer purchase behavior but I could not find a research work which shows the combined effect of advertisement source factor, message appeal and media on consumers purchase intention.
A research conducted by Smith and Foxcrost to determine the influence of advertisement in alcohol consumption they found out that exposure to an advertisement affects alcohol consumption behavior which supports the argument of the strong theory this study was conducted on young people so it cannot be generalized to all age groups. Gossa in his study to determine the impact of advertisement on brand preference of beer products in Adama city Ethiopia, he found out that advertisement has an impact on beer brand preference among the target population further he concluded that television advertisement is more influential than other media. Given the above facts Gossa‘s study has these limitations; its generalizablity is less since it considered only Adama city, in the conceptual frame work it is shown that the study used media and advertisement source as a mediating variable but the research used only correlation and regression analysis which may impact the result and does not properly show the relationship between the variables.
In another study which is conducted in Ghana to determine the impact of advertisement in the use of bank and banking services, the authors found out that other factors like word of mouth, referencing by relatives, and availability of the bank in the surrounding influence their choice of banks and use of banking service than advertising which supports the weak theory of advertising. This study uses only 70 respondents of five banks across the country and the sampling technique used is snow ball which may affect the reliability and validity of the study.
To the best knowledge of the researcher there is no study undertaken to study the influence of emotional appeal advertisement on purchase intention in the case of cosmetic products. Therefore this study tries to study the influence of emotional appeal advertisement of cosmetic products on purchase intention in Nigeria.
1.3 Objectives of the Study
The broad objective of this study is to investigate the influence of emotional appeal advertisement of cosmetic products on purchase intention in Nigeria. The specific objectives however include;
i) To examine the influence of beer advertisement on generating consumer purchase intention.
ii) To determine the advertisement factor that has a strong impact on generating consumers purchase intention of cosmetics products.
iii) To assess the advertisement strategy that is most influential in generating purchase intention among consumers of cosmetic products in Nigeria.
1.4 Research Questions
The following are some of the questions which this study intends to answer:
i) What is the influence of beer advertisement on generating consumer purchase intention?
ii) Which of the advertisement factor has a strong impact on generating consumers purchase intention of cosmetics products?
iii) What is the advertisement strategy that is most influential in generating purchase intention among consumers of cosmetic products in Nigeria?
1.5 Research Hypotheses
The following will be the research hypotheses to be tested for this study:
i) There is no significant correlation between emotional appeal advertisement and consumer purchase intention.
ii) There is no significant relationship between advertisement strategy and consumer purchase intention.
1.6 Significance of the Study
This study is aimed at contributing to the academic literature by revealing the degree of influence of advertising has in generating consumers’ purchase intention. The result of the study will be of immense benefit to advertisers of cosmetics product category as it will provide a guide on planning, production and placement of advertisements for the product.
1.7 Scope of the Study
This study aims to understand the influence of advertisement in generating consumers purchase intention by determining the advertisement factor which has the most impact on generating consumers purchase intention , and if the influence of advertisement varies or change with the consumer profile. To achieve this aim, the scope of this study is to identify different factors that is advertisement media, advertisement source factor and advertisement message appeal. This study scope is limited to consumers of cosmetics products at Dupe Cosmetics, Tom Jones, Lagos Island, Lagos State, Nigeria.
1.8 Limitations of the Study
One of the major limitations of this study is it did not incorporate the views from the advertiser side; it includes only the views of consumers of cosmetics products. Besides the research is limited in Lagos city and its residents also it focuses only cosmetics products and does not include any other products which would increase the generalize ability of the research.
