Effekterna av att signalera hög annonskostnad för ett välgörenhetsföretag - ett undantag från tidigare forskning om signalteori

Sammanfattning: In today's fast-paced, intense and complex media environment, it is hard for non-profit charity organizations to reach out and get their messages heard.In this study we examine whether the theories of advertising signaling also applies for charities. Past studies of the signaling theories indicates that higher perceived advertising expense leads to more positive effects on purchase behavior and brand perceptions. However, we believe that this does not apply for a charity organization. We argue that since charitable organizations have a fundamentally different mission than commercial companies, they will need different ways to signal quality and credibility, and therefore the common signal-theories will not hold for these organizations.To test our hypotheses, we conducted two surveys where the respondents saw one of five versions of the same ad for a well-known Swedish charity organization, or one of two ads for a commercial corporation. The ads had been manipulated to simulate different levels of perceived cost.Our results shows that perceived ad cost only affects attitude towards the ad if a charity was the sender, whereas perceived ad cost affects intentions, attitudes and credibility if a commercial corporation was the sender. Our findings implies that marketers of charity organizations do not need to invest effort and/or money in the same degree as marketers of profit-driven companies, since there are no clear advantages in the short term of having ads with high perceived quality.