On The Consistency Between “Native Advertising” And “Social Background”:How Native Ad Fails In The Context Of Social App Feeds

In recent years,with the rapid development of information technology and computer algorithms,a new advertising form,native advertising has appeared on a large number of social media platforms,which is more consistent with the social background.It is highly consistent with the style and content form of the platform to minimize the interference to the user’s social feeds experience.However,users are eventually able to detect this kind of marketing “trick” and identify its persuasive intent,which often trigger negative psychological process and affect subsequent click or purchase intentions.For native ads in the social media environment,platform developers generally give users the option to give feedback on the ads(such as “like”,“close this AD”,“complain this AD”,etc.)to understand the users’ attitude toward the native ads,and then they can use it to improve the native advertising design and platform push strategy.However,for the vast majority of native advertising users,they will not take the initiative to produce feedback behavior in this private social environment,their behavior of ignoring advertising will cause the user’s psychological reaction and the next step behavior cannot be understood.But this is exactly what brand,platform,and the researchers are concerned about “under the iceberg”.Therefore,this paper focuses on how the presentation form of different advertising features and the consistency level between them will affect the user’s psychological reactance and subsequent product perception.From the perspective of the consistency between native advertising and social background,this paper probe how different advertising features and combination forms will affect users’ psychological reactance and product perception,and this paper also extend the push strategy of ad,considering the moderating effect of individual differences.This article is carried out through three gradual in-depth studies.Starting from the advertising source,this paper studies the impact of different sources pushing native ads to target users on their state reactance and product perception,and considers the moderating effect of product types,also verifies the basic structure of the model.Then it further focuses on the professionalism degree of advertising logo,considering the degree of consistency between it and the content type on user’s psychology and attitude.Finally,the current research breaks out of the long-standing recommendation strategy,namely system-tailored native ads.We turn to seek a push strategy that gives users higher initiative,that is,user-tailored or customization native advertising,to achieve the purpose of reducing users’ state reactance.The empirical analysis results of multiple studies prove that:(1)Maintaining the consistency between advertising sources and product types can effectively reduce the users’ state reactance,thus improving product perception.For hedonic goods,star-sourced advertising is better than brand-sourced advertising.(2)Character logo is more effective in the process of pushing native ads.For logo sources with formal appearance or high degree of professionalism,they are more likely to be regarded as merchants and marketers when pushing native ads.In this case,release promotional content is more consistent with the personal identity,which can get user recognition and better advertising effect.(3)With the improvement of individual perception of uniqueness,user-tailored push strategy can significantly reduce users’ psychological reactance and enhance product perception.According to the empirical research results,this paper puts forward some practical suggestions for the brand or enterprise marketers and platforms to reduce users’ reactance and negative psychological attitudes.Finally,the shortcomings of this study are pointed out and prospects are put forward.