How social media users trust advertising more than you think

Sammanfattning: Consumers today are no longer bound to advertisers in their search for product information. Social media platforms and technologies are now empowering consumers to share product information with each other. This act is disempowering marketers and their agencies of record that are struggling to be relevant in the age of Web 2.0. Despite the low switching costs of turning away from traditional advertising to obtain product information, unscrupulous marketing practices persist. We maintain that these actions are feeding a rising mistrust in commercial advertising that is encouraging even more consumers to engage in electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) on social media platforms. This paper looks at this rising mistrust and how it might describe consumers who engage in electronic word-of-mouth about products after purchase. We rely on Web survey data from the Canadian Tourism Commission (CTC) which looks at a population of UK consumers that purchase travel and then go on to describe their trip to others using social media. Unique to this study is the use of social values methodology to measure trust in advertising. Our findings suggest that social media users trust advertising in spite of current advertising practices, while those who do not use social media, score below the mean on this trend. Theoretically, our results imply that trust in advertising may have more to do with a consumer’s fundamental outlook on life than it does with the credibility of the source where the advertising itself came from. More practically, our results provide a measure of certainty for company executives who may wish to use social media as part of more integrated marketing campaigns designed to capture user-generated content and to redirect this highly influential source of marketplace information at other consumers.