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The purpose of this paper is to study the responses of young consumers to suspected covert and overt product-brand recommendations in a blog.

Experimental design was applied to investigate the effect of covert and overt marketing on young consumers’ perceptions of blogger credibility and their behavioural intentions.

Overt marketing had a negative effect on behavioural intentions, such as future interest in the blogger, intention to engage in word-of-mouth, and purchase intention. Covert marketing did not affect the intended behaviour. Neither covert nor overt marketing influenced the blogger’s credibility.

The study was delimited to a small sample; one blog, one type of product recommendation, and a well-known brand. Young, well-educated consumers with experience in reading blogs may be able to filter the brand recommendations and focus on the content of the blog.

This study has implications for bloggers, companies, and policy makers. Although overt marketing is the most open and the recommended form of blog marketing, the study showed that overt marketing has negative effects. Therefore, bloggers need to carefully consider how they present a sponsorship.

The study makes three important contributions. First, it answers the call for research on consumer reactions to covert (deceptive) and overt marketing tactics. Second, it contributes to blog marketing research by studying a case of suspected covert marketing where consumers do not know whether the blog is sponsored or not. Third, the study contributes to knowledge around young consumers, demonstrating that covert and overt tactics do not affect blogger credibility.

The rapid digital transformation is driving businesses to reexamine their marketing plans and practices. Marketers face new conflicts while they are implementing digital marketing strategies. The main objective of this chapter is to deeply understand these conflicts and to provide appropriate solutions. This chapter addresses six digital conflicts that challenge marketers most: (1) online versus offline channel conflicts, (2) conflicts stemming from digitalization gap, (3) conflicts in influencer marketing context, (4) conflicts in artificial intelligence (AI) context, (5) environmental conflicts and digital marketing, and (6) ethical conflicts and digital marketing. Finally, we discuss conflict management strategies for the most challenging digital marketing conflicts.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of the type of disclosure used by social media influencers on consumer evaluations of influencer transparency, product performance expectations and how those factors ultimately influence purchase intentions.

An experiment was conducted with 321 participants recruited from MTurk to test a moderated serial-mediation model.

The results indicate that when consumers become cognizant that an influencer’s branded promotional post may have been motivated by an underlying financial relationship, they evaluate the influencer as significantly less transparent if a more ambiguous disclosure is used relative to a clearer disclosure. Transparency perceptions of the influencer impact consumers’ perceptions of product efficacy as well as purchase intentions.

Social media influencers are rapidly emerging as a popular marketing tool for brand managers, but consumer response to this form of promotion is not well understood. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to investigate how the type of endorsement disclosure used by a social media influencer impacts consumer perception of influencer transparency, product efficacy and purchase intentions. Further, this research demonstrates the applicability of the persuasion knowledge model in the domain of influencer marketing.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce and explore the tenets of the mindful entrepreneurial marketing (MEM) construct and to illustrate its mediation effect between production and consumption.

Based on the existing mindfulness and entrepreneurial marketing research, this paper explores tenets of MEM and presents a basic taxonomy to identify mindful production and consumption practices, and opportunities for MEM initiatives.

The study proposes that the combination of mindfulness and entrepreneurial marketing approach provides an ideal match where both consumers and mindful producers can become more mindful and prosper. As a new construct, MEM has the potential to alleviate lack of consumption, to create awareness about overconsumption and, ultimately, to enhance societal welfare by increasing the efficiency of markets by enabling more effective usage of society’s resources.

This paper is the first study that focuses on the MEM construct. In this respect, the study contributes to mindfulness, mindful marketing, entrepreneurial marketing and the general marketing literature.

This article aims to examine the US history of practices that mask the marketing content of messages to consumers and of the public policy approaches taken towards such practices.

This research examines both primary sources such as legal challenges and contemporary writings as well as secondary sources.

The US legal/regulatory system has been examining practices that mask the marketing content of communications for over 125 years. Fully masked messages were initially regulated under postal service laws and publisher self‐regulatory codes. Partially masked messages, e.g. testimonials, were examined first by courts and later by regulatory and industry self‐regulatory agencies. These diverse sources of regulation led to diverse approaches and in part explain the modern preference for information disclosure over prohibiting the masking of marketing messages.

Modern analysis of these practices ignores their history and the historical evolution of their regulation. This article not only reveals a rich regulatory history, but also suggests that modern policy should treat the broad array of masking practices consistently and correct current policy approaches that are based on historical development rather than modern public policy analysis and concerns.

This chapter provides an overview of what is currently known in the scientific literature about the effects of disclosures of sponsored content on consumers’ responses.

We provide a qualitative literature review of 21 empirical studies.

Awareness of disclosures is rather low, but when consumers are aware of a disclosure, it successfully activates persuasion knowledge and can increase brand memory. The literature shows inconclusive findings with respect to the effects of disclosures on attention paid to sponsored content, critical processing, brand attitudes, and purchase intentions. In addition, the literature shows that modality of the disclosure has no significant effects, but the content of the disclosure, its timing, its duration, receivers’ moods, and their perceptions of the sponsored content or the endorser are important moderators.

More research is needed on differences in effects of disclosures in different media and on disclosures of online sponsored content online (e.g., sponsored tweets and vlogs).

This chapter provides advertisers with insights on how disclosures affect the persuasiveness of sponsored content in several media.

For legislators, explicit guidelines on how to create effective disclosures of sponsored content are provided. For example, to increase persuasion knowledge, disclosures should be portrayed for at least 3 seconds and if logos are used, they should be accompanied by texts explaining the logo.

This overview is a valuable starting point for future academic research in the domain of disclosure effects and provides insights for advertisers and legislators.

The purpose of this study contributes to literature on marketing communications by empirically contrasting the effectiveness of a new form of covert promotions (product placement in recipes) and an overt promotion (traditional advertisement). The mediating role of perceived believability of promotional materials and the moderating roles of advertising skepticism and brand awareness were examined based on a conceptual model.

A Web-based experiment with 2 (form of promotion: overt versus covert) × 2 (brand awareness: low versus high) between-subjects full factorial design was used. A public sample of 537 participants had participated in the study. The conceptual model was further tested on 106 participants using stimuli of a fictitious brand.

A two-stage moderated mediation analysis shows that the perceived believability of promotional materials was a significant mediator of the form of promotion and brand evaluations. Consumers showed a higher level of believability toward covert promotion, which, in turn, led to more positive evaluations of the promoted brand. Advertising skepticism and brand awareness were found to significantly moderate the relationship between form of promotion and attitudes toward the promoted brands. A similar pattern of results was obtained when stimuli of a fictitious brand were used.

This research addresses an important issue in marketing communication and extends the understanding of the perception of overt and covert promotions by examining the underlying mediating and moderating variables, which have rarely been explored before. The results guide marketers in developing effective marketing communication strategies for well-known, less well-known and even new brands. It also directs policymakers to consider whether integrated branded content in recipes should be disclosed to protect consumers from surreptitious promotions, which may help to lower consumers’ skepticism toward advertising in the long run.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and redefine the categories of covert advertising, to demonstrate the covert aspects of advertising in the press, to provide a high-quality comparison of three leading Slovenian newspapers and to prepare a model for future researchers.

In this article, the authors defined, analyzed, and explored covert advertising. In the first part, the authors used descriptive approach and method of compilation. In the empirical part, the authors used content analysis to research texts of covert advertising; the authors used analytical approach. Data were analyzed with the help of the computer programme SPSS.

The results of the research indicate that covert advertising appears on a daily basis in daily newspapers and these articles are visually more attractive to garner greater attention from readers and offer numerous visual presentations.

The first limitation is presenting a lack of literature in this area, especially very poor knowledge of covert advertising in English, American and German literature. There is not a single word that around the world marked the same phenomenon. This research is limited to print media; it cannot be generalized to all media. This is a survey of ads where the authors cannot rule out subjective assessments.

The significance of this research is that texts with covert advertising in Slovenia were for the first time scientifically investigated. The research approach and methodological instruments could be used as a model, a simplified representation of reality for future researches.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to marketing communications literature by exploring consumer responses to covert advertising (CA) in a social media context.

The persuasion knowledge model was used to explore the impact of CA on brand evaluations. A factorial design experiment was conducted in a social media context (YouTube).

The results of the study show that triggering knowledge about CA changes the way consumers respond to unfamiliar brands that use such tactics. This implies that for unfamiliar brands, with future development of persuasion knowledge, CA in social media will not only be ineffective but also detrimental with damaging effects on the brand.

An important contribution of this study lies in the application of the persuasion knowledge model to social media context.

The results indicate that firms should desist from covert product and brand communications in social media contexts, and instead employ disclosed brand communications.

Given that the effects of CA have not been investigated in an online context, this study makes a unique contribution to brand communications research by providing valuable insights and better understanding of the effects of CA in social media, specifically YouTube.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate fashion blogs’ influence on Spanish Millennials’ buying behaviour.

This research is quantitative in nature, utilising a mono method consisting of structured self-administered questionnaires. Data were exported to IBM SPSS Statistics, where different types of analyses were combined – such as frequencies, means, hypothesis testing analyses, principal components analysis or K-means cluster.

Findings show that the most important motivations to follow a fashion blog are entertainment and information seeking. Besides, consumers’ attitudes seem to be influenced by how consumers assess credibility, which is determined by trustworthiness, para-social interaction (PSI), expertise and message credibility. Finally, after showing covert and overt marketing posts, both trustworthiness and PSI were lower than before, identifying PSI as a possible moderator in these cases.

The main limitation of this study is the sample size, which does not make it possible to generalise conclusions.

From this research, it can be said that, due to the importance of establishing a strong relationship with the public, bloggers should try to connect with readers on an emotional level, and brands need to select bloggers very carefully.

This paper reveals Millennials’ attitudes whilst they are visiting a fashion blog and the influence that these attitudes can exercise on their purchase intention.