MARKETING GOES UNDERCOVER; AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY ON UNDERCOVER VS DISCLOSE MARKETING TOWARD GEN Z IN INSTAGRAM, THE MODERATING ROLE OF ADVERTISING SOURCE

• Main Author: Nabiel Ikram, Thariq
• Format: Final Project
• Language: Indonesia
• Online Access: https://digilib.itb.ac.id/gdl/view/38784
• Institution: Institut Teknologi Bandung

In a world with million of ads communicated across multiple medias every day, a new challenge for marketers has arised as people nowadays are creating ad-avoiding behaviour where they become more cautious and selective toward marketing messages. Undercover marketing, a marketing strategy that purposely hide the nature of the advertising with the aim to reach consumers without their knowledge of being persuaded, has been identified as an effective strategy to break this ad-avoiding behaviour. Where previously undercover marketing was widely practiced in offline channel (e.g. artificial crowds, manipulation, product placement, etc), it is important to know the performance of this strategy in digital channel primarily in social media as it is predicted that half of all global advertising cost will be allocated for online ads by 2020. Related with the nature of undercover marketing, the trend of non-celebrity endorser has arised as it involves genuine and personal conversations about products people have every day and has reported to be more preferable compared to advertisement posted by celebrity. Thus, this study aimed to identify the effect of undercover marketing in social media by using a 2 (undercover vs disclose marketing) x 2 (celebrity vs non-celebrity endorser) experimental research design. The results concluded that undercover marketing and advertisement that is posted by non-celebrity are less likely to activate conceptual persuasion knowledge (less likely to recognize the content as advertising) and less likely to activate attitudinal persuasion knowledge (less likely to have distrusting and skeptical attitude) and ultimately having higher level of consumer engagement. In contrast, disclose marketing and an ad that is posted by celebrity has a stronger effect in activating conceptual persuasion knowledge and thus leads to the use of attitudinal persuasion knowledge (more likely to have distrusting belief and skeptical attitude) and ultimately decreased consumer engagement. Based on the findings, this study sugessted two recommendations for marketers: first, as this study found that undercover marketing resulted in a lower level of persuasion knowledge and higher level of consumer engagement compared to disclose marketing, marketers can consider to apply undercover marketing strategy; secondly, as this study found that advertisement posted by non-celebrity has resulted in a lower level of consumers? persuasion knowledge and higher level of consumer engagement, marketer can consider to tap into peer-based advertisement strategy.