The Overlooked Generation Online: Older Consumers and their attitudes toward Facebook advertising - : A quantitative study examining the factors affecting older consumers' attitudes toward Facebook advertising

Sammanfattning: Although digital marketing and social media advertising for the past decades has become an integral factor for commercial companies in order to succeed, the group of older consumers seems to have been overlooked. The purpose of this study was to explore and increase the understanding about how Facebook advertising better can be utilized for older consumers [55+] in order to provide professionals with insights about how to better capture this opportunity. With the aim of identifying and examining the factors having an effect on older consumers’ attitudes towards Facebook advertising a conceptual framework with the foundation of Ducoff’s advertising value model was created. The factors anticipated to have an effect on older consumers attitudes towards Facebook advertising were informativeness, entertainment, irritation, credibility, emotional appeal, and perceived ad relevance. A quantitative method was used where empirical data was collected by a questionnaire and tested with a regression analysis. The analysis revealed informativeness, entertainment, perceived ad relevance and irritation as having a significant effect on older consumers’ attitudes toward Facebook advertising, whereas entertainment and perceived ad relevance was determined as having the most impact. These results indicated that when targeting older consumers’, the focus should be on entertaining content perceived informative and relevant by the receiver which expands both the theoretical and managerial knowledge about advertising for older consumers.