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Introduction
Advertising is commonly used to attract the attention of consumers and facilitate their purchase decisions (Bergkvist et al., 2016). As an informational clue for customer identity and selection (Boush, 2010), an advertisement’s self-presentation style is important for customers deciding whether to establish an open-ended relationship with the advertised product (Escalas, 2004; Escalas and Bettman, 2017; Thomson, 2006). Like interpersonal communication, which can be self-deprecating or self-enhancing (Martin et al., 2003; Skaalvik, 1997), advertising also has these two presentation styles. The self-presentation of an advertisement conveys a product promise or image across the social domains of popular culture and mass media (Oscario et al., 2017). Although self-deprecating advertising uses a realistic or sometimes derogatory description to poke fun at or belittle the advertised product, it can be useful to attract consumer attention under certain circumstances (Gong and Li, 2017). On the other hand, self-enhancing advertising uses boastful language to promote a product, which can be effective in presenting the differentiated value of a product (Packard et al., 2016).
In modern society, consumers use cues from advertising as a means to establish a relationship with the product/brand being advertised (Poppe and Linssen, 2011; Kim and Mcgill, 2011). The self-presentation style of an advertisement has a direct effect on customers’ self-image, and this is closely related to their self-esteem (Thomson, 2006), which in turn affects purchasing decision making (Bergkvist et al., 2016).
The purpose of this study is twofold. First, based on self-consistency theory, we investigate how the self-presentation style of advertising, which is either self-deprecating or self-enhancing, affects consumers’ self-image. Self-image is divided into the ideal self and the real self. Here, we explore how consumers’ self-image influences their purchase intention. As purchase intention indicates the likelihood of buying a certain product or service in the future (Wu et al., 2011), it is a close proxy for an actual purchase, which is useful in the research context (Hoffmann and Broekhuizen, 2010). Thus, we examine the mediating effect of consumer self-image on the connection between the self-presentation style of an advertisement and purchase intention. In other words, we explore the relationship chain of “self-presentation style of advertising – consumer self-image – purchase intention.”
Second, this relationship chain may vary depending on...