More Bang for the Buck

Abstract: The advertising industry is evolving. With increasing clutter, changing consumer behaviors and the rise of new advertising formats brands are forced to increasingly rely on consumers to voluntarily approach their advertising. Content marketing is especially interesting in connection to the evolving advertising industry. With more than 100 years of history and a core of generating value in the communication the intention has been to engage consumers and influence their behavior. The increased importance of content marketing has put a greater pressure on advertisers to understand how to create consumer-perceived value in the advertising and draw consumers towards it. The purpose of this thesis was to understand if format attitude and advertising equity have an effect on message equity and consumers' approach behaviors (willingness to attend and willingness to co-create) towards a specific content message. A quantitative laboratory experiment was conducted with 238 respondents with the questionnaires collected via an online panel. The result indicated that consumers' attitude towards the format which the content is distributed in has a positive effect on consumers' approach behaviors towards a specific content message, an effect mediated by message equity. Advertising equity does not have an effect on message equity or consumers' approach behaviors. In addition, the study reveals that the effect of format attitude on approach behaviors is not dependent on the brand's advertising equity.