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In recent years, closed social networking sites (SNSs) have become popular advertising media. Marketer-generated advertisements (MGAs) and user-generated advertisements (UGAs) are the two pillars of advertising businesses. The objective of this research is to investigate and compare how these ad types (i.e. MGA versus UGA) affect advertising effectiveness in closed SNSs.

The authors conducted a scenario-based experiment of 403 WeChat users in China and used partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to examine the research model.

The study results indicate that UGAs perform better than MGAs in enhancing consumers' perceived informativeness, credibility and entertainment, while MGAs are more likely to make consumers feel irritated than UGAs in closed SNSs. Moreover, consumers' perceived informativeness, credibility and entertainment positively influence advertising effectiveness, whereas perceived irritation negatively affects it.

This study reveals consumers' psychological response mechanisms to MGA and UGA and sheds light on their differential effectiveness by extending the stimuli-organism-response model to the context of closed SNSs.

Relational norms, referring to shared values about behavioral rules, distinguish communal and exchange relationships based on different reciprocal expectations between actors. This research explains how reciprocal expectations behind the two relationships trigger gift givers' disparate behavioral goals and further determine their gift choices.

The current work uses three lab experiments (N = 482) and one consumer survey (N = 422) to collect Chinese gifting data. Multiple data-analysis methods – crosstab analysis, ANOVA, linear regression and bootstrapping procedures – confirm the hypotheses.

Gift givers distinguish communal and exchange recipients. When selecting gifts for communal (exchange) recipients, people depended more strongly on rational analyses (intuition), preferring products superior on cognitive (affective) attributions. Further, givers primed to be rational decision-makers by anticipating that recipients would evaluate the gifts immediately in their presence, regardless of the communal or exchange context, preferred cognitively superior products.

From a managerial perspective, marketers can make targeted recommendations by highlighting the appropriate attribute dimension (cognitive or affective) after learning givers' reciprocal expectations.

This work contributes to the gift-giving literature by revealing the direct link between gifting goals and gift choices, extending the understanding of consumers' gift-selection strategies.