Realisation that online advertisements are misleading: Involvement of middle-aged and older adults with botanical dietary supplements

This study designed media-rich online botanical dietary supplement advertisements that contained misleading claims and probed factors affecting the purchase intention of mature consumers (middle-aged and older adults). We identified inter-age-group path differences in consumer involvement and purchase intention once the misleading claims in the advertisements had been highlighted. The results indicated the following: (1) Online botanical dietary supplement (BDS) consumption is a rational utilitarian-driven behaviour, with cognitive product involvement playing a dominant role in the decision-making. (2) Cognitive product involvement and affective advertisement involvement positively affect mature consumers’ situational involvement. (3) Situational involvement mediates the effects of product involvement and advertisement involvement on purchase intention; once misleading claims are highlighted to consumers, the consumers place themselves in a specific purchase situation and cautiously evaluate BDS product before consumption. (4) Middle-aged and older adults have different information-processing paths when faced with BDS purchases. Specifically, middle-aged consumers are more capable of identifying misleading information during their decision-making than are older adults; conversely, older-adult consumers are more easily swayed by health-evoking visual cues in advertisements, thus prompting them to purchase the advertised BDSs. Our findings indicate that consumer education is crucial and that consumers must be vigilant against being swayed by misleading advertisements. This study extends the model of consumer involvement and offers educational programmes of identifying misleading claims in advertisements that can be applied in middle-aged and older consumers to improve their risk perception within the context of online Chinese BDS advertisements.