From the marketing perspective, advertising is any paid form of non-personal presentation and promotion of ideas, goods or services by an identified sponsor. From the perspective of communication, advertising convey persuasive information through mass communication media. The main effects of advertising are the sales effect and the communication effect.
Studies of the communication effect focus mainly on a series of responses in cognitive, affective and conative dimensions of consumers after stimulation by an ad message. The cognitive dimension includes recognition and understanding; the affective dimension includes liking and preference; the conative dimension includes determination and buying. From the communication perspective, the purpose of advertising is to convey persuasive information via mass communication media.
This study views product recommendation information on blogs as advertising from the communication perspective to explore the advertising effectiveness of blogs. The advertising effectiveness of blogs is measured by four variables: perceived risk, advertising attitude, brand attitude, and purchase intention. In an online context, when consumers have to select a brand to meet their needs, they logically will choose from among those brands that come to mind by visiting the Web sites of the brands they recall or putting the brand name in the search engine. Product awareness on the Internet also may affect purchase intention. The greater the consumer\’s product awareness, the greater the reduction in the perceived risk associated with the acquisition of that product. Users who perceive a greater risk are likely to search with a clear aim in mind, rather than just for the purpose of browsing online. To secure an online purchase, marketers should consider the use of communication tools that jointly increase brand, product, and message awareness. Huang and Sarigöllü (2012) demonstrated that brand awareness influences consumer purchase decisions. Creating brand awareness is the first step to ensuring that a product is included in the consideration set of a potential consumer because brand awareness can further affect their decisions. This study defines brand awareness as the ability of a customer to recognised or recall a brand and includes brand awareness as a research variable.
