The Role of User Involvement, User Involvement Types, Product Category Involvement and Advertising Appeals in Social Media Advertising Effectiveness: A Middle East Context (Iran)

Abstract

Until now, no study has proposed strategies for social media advertising, scrutinizing the differential interaction of user involvement, different kinds of user involvement, product category involvement, and advertising appeals considering the unique characteristics of social media users in the Middle East. The present study addresses this issue by introducing two detailed advertising effectiveness grids in 20 situations for social media advertising in the Middle East context (Iran) and revised the previous grids and findings proposed for Western and Eastern countries in the area of traditional media advertising effectiveness. In all, 552 students of the University of Tehran, who are social media users were randomly selected, and questionnaires were distributed via an online platform. In order to explore the hypotheses, a mixed 2 × 2 × 2 factorial design was employed, followed by assessment of the validity and reliability of the measures. Surprisingly, some findings were contrary to traditional findings and grids both in the West and in the East and suggest different and new strategies; however, some were in line with traditional studies.