Consumer attitudes toward blogger's sponsored recommendations and purchase intention: The effect of sponsorship type, product type, and brand awareness

Sponsored recommendation blog posts, a form of online consumer review, are blog articles written by bloggers who receive benefits from sponsoring marketers to review and promote products on their personal blog. Because national regulations require that marketer sponsorship must be revealed in the blog post, sponsored recommendation posts can no longer conceal their marketing intent. Consumer’s attitudes toward sponsored recommendation posts are thus a vital issue in assessing the effectiveness of the advertisement. This study uses a 2(sponsorship type) ! 2(product type) ! 2(brand awareness) experimental design and a total of 613 valid samples to examine consumer attitudes toward sponsored recommendation posts and purchase intention. The results show that when products recommended in blog posts are search goods or have high brand awareness, consumers have highly positive attitudes toward sponsored recommendation posts, which improves purchase intention. The directly-monetary/ indirect-monetary benefits received by the bloggers have no significant effect on readership attitudes. Using these features in blog writings appears to improve online readers’ trust toward and the credibility of sponsored recommendation posts and thus can be a vital online marketing tool for marketers. ! 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.