The advertising ethics: The impact of social media on Internet purchasing decision

Running Header: THE ADVERTISING ETHICS: THE IMPACT OF SOCIAL MEDIA ON INTERNET PURCHASING DECISION

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The advertising ethics: The impact of social media on Internetpurchasing decision

Ying Zhang

Central Michigan University

THE ADVERTISING ETHICS: THE IMPACT OF SOCIAL MEDIA ON INTERNET PURCHASING DECISION 2

Introduction

With the tendency of shopping online, companies and

retailers realized that social media is an effective tool for

advertising. There are several advertising ethics will impact the

customers’ purchasing decision. For example, many companies have

a Facebook page in order to contact with customers. They post

information about new products, send coupons and do the

satisfaction survey through using social media. Sometimes this

kind of advertising method has unethical aspects, for example,

some companies will ignore the negative comments. What’s more,

information from emails or some website are dangerous, it’s a

problem of privacy leakage. So, researches on advertising ethics

is necessary and helpful for companies and customers to cooperate

and create a peaceful online shopping environment.

The present researches had realized there are ethics

problems on online business. People like to read ads when make

shopping decision especially women. Wolin and Korgaonkar(2003)

paid particular attention to the different opinions towards web

advertising of men and women. They develop a survey to collect


participants’ opinions on web advertising. The writers selected

420 consumers from a large urban place of US whose population is

as large as 1.6 million (Wolin, et al., 2003). The result showed

that the male participants preferred to purchase online than the

female priticipants, but the female participants spent more time

on web advertising to choose, compare for fun (Wolin, et al.,

2003). It is not hard to imagine that women’s special interest on

online business and advertising will drive them to compare the

advertising information and the truth, evaluate the reliability

of ads.

Another research is conducted by Sanayei, Poraman and

Shalikar (2011) to examine Niazrooz.com, a website which is used

for retailers to advertise themselves. The sample is selected

randomly as it was only gathered when customers visited the

website (RSanayei et al., 2011). The data was analyzed and made

to six tables which are related to sample characteristics,

variables, Pearson correlation, CFA, path analysis and regression

weights (RSanayei et al., 2011). The result reflected that ethics

affected participants’ trust when they surfed the Niazrooz. The


writer did a successful research by case study on a specific

website: Niazrooz.com. This website is for retailers to post

their information so that consumers can follow the links to

contact with retailers if they feel the good is what they want.

Although the writers had realized the website need more action to

examine the information posted by retailers to make sure the

website can avoid the unethical messages, they didn’t expand

their method to collect more data to prove it.

And Ruiz and Llaguno (2012) also issued that some unethical

problems existed on some websites. The writers began their

research by reviewing the primary studies, which had showed the

relationship between ethics and advertising. However, there were

few studies, which could show the ethics problems on corporate

websites when they add advertising information through agencies.

The writer firstly listed a number of agencies and websites, and

then analyzed the links, made a new table to show whether these

agencies included ethical promise (Ruiz et al., 2012). The result

concluded that only a quarter of companies didn’t have ethical

problems on their corporate websites (Ruiz et al., 2012).


Studies also showed that these ethical problems such as

privacy have strong relationship with customer’s decision. Limbu,

Wolf and Lunsford (2011) conducted an online survey to study what

is related to people’s satisfaction of an online shopping

website. The writers conducted the survey online among 220

students of “a mid-size university located in southwest of US”

(Limbu et al., 2011). The survey result is among the three

predict effects: security, fulfillment, and non-deception, only

privacy has a strong effect on customer’s satisfaction. This is a

successful research by doing the survey and found out the strong

relationship between privacy and customer’s satisfaction.

However, the sample limited the validity of the research because

the writer only chose the sample in a school. I don’t think the

online shoppers are all in school. So it will be better to border

the sample with people who are out of school. Another research

conducted a research on privacy but the sample is all out of

school.

Stanaland, Lwin and Miyazaki (2011) demonstrated that by

online advertising, a special symbol called “privacy Trustmark”


could help improve the ethical level at some special situations

(Stanaland et al, 2011). In order to collect information from

those who want to get advertising services, the research sample

was from customers who were taking a cruise trip and had very

limited access to shopping. When they surfed the Internet to

gather useful information for shore excursion services, some of

their website’s interface had privacy Trustmark, and the other

didn’t have. After comparing the two kinds of data, the result

reflected that when people realized the online privacy Trustmark,

it would have positive effect on improving their belief on

ethics. It seemed like that Internet causes all the ethical

problems, especially by social media like Facebook or Email,

which will cause special ethical problems when the communication

between customers and companies is happened. There is obviously

value in extending these studies to cover more disciplines on

communication method, especially the social media method, which

is becoming more and more important.

There are a lot of studies showed that social media have a

significant impact on online


business. Lillquvist and Louhiala-Salminen(2014) evaluated that

companies could improve their credibility by using social media

to communicate with customers. The study was began with what data

will be included in analysis. Then a “small-d analysis” which

meant the study was focused on the language used in a certain

context was used as the “discourse analysis” method. (Lillquvist

et al, 2014). The authors conducted the research based on two

companies’ Facebook page, which were the Foody and Logy

(Lillquvist et al, 2014). The authors also stated that people who

managed the Facebook page for the company needed to change the

individual habit of using language in order to acquire the good

sense of followers (Lillquvist et al, 2014).

From this perspective, in another article, Lee, Oh and Kim

(2013) did a research on if a company’s CSR ranting will make

diffidence on the using of social media. They divided the

research into three main parts, which included how early a

company start using the social media, how many followers a

company have in social media, and companies prefer to produce

firm-driven or user-driven communication (Lee et al, 2013). The


research was conducted based on the research of US fortune 500’s

companies that have CSR ranking. The CSR is referred to corporate

social responsibility. Eventually, the authors emphasized that

firms which had higher CSR ranking realized the importance of

social earlier and have a larger amount of followers that those

whose ranking is lower. One more study was conducted to show that

companies tend to ignore negative comments on Facebook.

Goodman (2012) evaluated how large companies handle the

negative feedback to from Facebook, which is a most popular form

of social media. Goodman collected information from ten

companies, which were from four different industries and have

enough fans on Facebook. The result is that nearly half of the

companies tended to delete negative comments on Facebook and some

companies only responded to a small part of negative comments

(Goodman, 2012).

Currently, the majority studies of ethical impact on online

business ads were inspected at regular official pages of

companies and ads website, which limited the validity of the

researches because social media is also a vital method for


companies to advertise their products. Considering this point,

unethical problems related to social media also need to be paid

special attention on. Thus, there is obviously value in extending

these studies to cover more disciplines. So, the main purpose of

my investigation was to evaluate the impact of social media on

Internet purchasing decision, and make further studies to give

the companies’ holders instructions on how to use the social

media correctly.


Methodology

Overview

Given the background of the research, two main steps were

included in the method section. Firstly, a questionnaire was sent

out to collect answers. Then, the data, which was collected from

the questionnaire, is analyzed. Finally, the researcher circled

out some interesting answer that could give special thoughts,


tried to connect with these participants, and made an interview

with them.

Research Questions:

In order to evaluate the impact of social media on Internet

purchasing decision, the questionnaire was include the questions

and showed below:

1. What’s your gender?

2. What kinds of social media do you use?

3. Do you follow some companies' pages on the social media?

4. What company page do you follow? Why?

5. Do you like the ads on some companies' pages?

6. Do you make comments on these companies page about the ads

information?

7. Have you ever get a reply from these companies?

8. How do you feel if your negative comments are ignored?

9. Will the ads on the companies' pages influence your

purchasing decisions?

Locations and Participants


The research was conducted online, and was only in Central

Michigan University because the questionnaire was only sent to

cmich.edu email. The participants are 20 students from CMU, half

of them are male, and half are female. After the questionnaire

was finished, two of the participants were connected to do

interviews. The interview was placed in UC on December 2nd.

Procedure

The whole research was divided into three parts. The first

parts was began from November 26th to November 30th that online

questionnaires were sent out to be answered. The questionnaire

included short answer questions and multiple choices questions.

For the multiple choices question, the data was automatically

calculated into graphs. And for the short answer questions, I

read carefully and picked out some interesting answers, the sent

email back to ask the participants if they could continue

participant my future interview. Two of the participants accepted

and then the interview was conducted on December 2nd. Finally,

some companies which was mentioned by the participants in the

questionnaire answers were analyzed based on their CSR ranking.


Results

Chart 1 is the reflection of customers’ attitude towards

online ads on social media. Over a half of college students

dislike the ads information on some companies’ pages. One thing

need to be point out is that, the 5 students who strongly dislike

online ads are all male participants, only 3 female students said

they dislike the ads on social media website. When asked if they

like to make comments on the companies page about those ads


information, nearly half of students express they have never made

comments on these website.


Chart 2 has 3 differents parts, they are all designed as pie

charts. Chart 1(a) shows 9 students have followed some companies’

social media page, such as facebook, twitter. Among the pages


they followed, most are commercial pages, those are Givenchy,

Zara, Kiehl’s, and so on. And most of the answers come from

female students. Male students also follow a few companies’

pages, but most of them are just for fun, like game companies.

Chart 2(b) is about if the participants got any reply from

these companies’ social media pages the followed. Only 20 percent

of the participants have ever got a reply. And in Chart 2(c),

when asked if the ads on the social media will influence their

purchasing decision, 70 percent of participants give the answer

“yes”.

In the eighth question, participants were asked that how

would they feel if they got a negative reply from the companies

on social media pages they followed. Most of students said they

felt uncomfortable. And in the interview, one student said that

she felt she was not respected. And another student said she felt

the company didn’t care what the customers thought and she would

not trust this company any more.

Discussion


With the rapid growth of online retailing, the ethics of

online retailing has become a major concern for consumers. And in

light of the negative impression that advertising often has among

consumers, attempts to raise the perceived ethics of online

advertisers are a challenge to advertising managers. The research

is of great importance because the social media represent a rich

resource for business. That means, social media is a vital method

for companies to generalize their products online. Managers of

companies can advertise their products by their own companies’

social media page instead of asking other formal advertising

companies for help.

As the results show, 80 percent of participants had never

received any responses from companies’ pages they followed on the

social media, which confirms Goodman’s (2012) research that

public relations professionals also find that organizations with

a social media presence may ignore unfavorable feedback because

they are afraid that their response will make fans feel more

unpleasant. However, participants of my research reflect that if

their negative comments are ignored by companies, they tend to


believe that they are not respected and will avoid purchasing the

products of these companies.

The finding of the paper is social media is a convenient way

for companies to generalize their products, on the other hand,

they will have to be closer to customers. In other words, the

conflicts between companies and customers may increase.

Companies’ behavior on social media, especially ethical impact on

their company images, can’t escape from followers’ eyes any more.

Considering these reasons, managers must reschedule their social

media, change the attitude towards customers.

There have been a number of calls for empirical research

regarding advertising and advertiser ethics. With the appearance

of social media, the issue of how to behave properly for

companies is one that has become a key ethical issue for

managers. This paper fills up the niche and also gives a few

suggestion to managers. However, the small size of sample and the

limited location and time for doing the questionnaire limit the

validity of the research.


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The advertising ethics: The impact of social media on Internet purchasing decision

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