| Consumers' affiliations with brands can run much deeper than merely holding favorable or unfavorable attitudes. In fact, consumers can form complex relationships with certain brands and use them to meet self-definitional needs and construct identity (e.g., Escalas & Bettman, 2003). When a relationship develops between a consumer and a brand, a self-brand connection (SBC) can form. SBCs comprise the extent to which a brand has been integrated into one's self-concept (Escalas & Bettman, 2003). Two studies were conducted to further understand the role of SBCs in the processing of advertising messages and the findings suggest that SBCs influence information processing and persuasion in novel ways.;Specifically, two experiments were run to explore the role of SBCs in the processing of advertising messages---one in the context of traditional product advertising and the other in the context of advocacy advertising. The first study employed a 2 (SBC strength: strong, weak) X 2 (product attribute importance: important, unimportant) X 2 (task importance: high, low) between-subjects factorial experiment to explore the role of SBCs in the processing of traditional product advertising within the theoretical framework of the heuristic-systematic model (HSM; Chaiken, 1980). The second study builds on the first study to understand the persuasive effects of SBCs in advocacy advertising within the theoretical framework of the Persuasion Knowledge Model (PKM; Friestad & Wright, 1994) by employing a 2 (SBC strength: strong, weak) X 2 (brand-cause congruency: congruent, incongruent) plus control (nonprofit source) between-subjects factorial experiment.;As predicted, across both studies, SBCs were found to have direct persuasive effects on several brand- and product/cause-related dependent variables. Furthermore, these studies suggest that SBCs can have the power to overcome two important barriers to persuasion---unimportant product attributes in product advertising and consumer suspicion of advocacy advertising. The findings from study one suggest that SBCs encouraged the defense-motivated processing of product-related information such that strong SBCs resulted in persuasion regardless of the importance of the product attributes presented in the advertisement. The findings from study two suggest that strong SBCs can reduce consumer suspicion of advocacy advertising resulting in increased persuasion. As expected, this effect was amplified when the brand and the cause were incongruent (e.g., a fast-food restaurant promoting physical fitness activity). Across the two experiments, perceived advertiser credibility was found to mediate the relationship between SBC strength and persuasion on certain outcome variables.;Overall, this dissertation offers evidence that brands, specifically self-brand connections, matter in persuasive communications. Furthermore, these studies explore the processes through which such persuasion occurs within the context of two types of advertising messages: product advertisements and advocacy advertisements. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed, and recommendations are made regarding future research. |
