ABARTILI REKLAMLARIN VE REKLAMA YÖNELİK ŞÜPHENİN MARKA TUTUMUNA, SATIN ALMA NİYETİNE VE MARKA GÜVENİNE ETKİSİ

A significant portion of today's consumers use at least one of the social media tools. It is unthinkable that there are no companies on this platform where existing and potential consumers are intensively involved. Advertisements on social media platforms can cause negative consequences as well as many positive situations. These situations are more likely to occur, especially in poorly thought advertisements made in an effort to highlight the product. The perceptions of suspicion formed in consumers as a result of faulty advertisements are the biggest handicap in front of companies. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to determine the antecedents and consequences of scepticism towards social media advertisements. The sample of the research consists of social media users.

Companies introduce the brands of their products and services to consumers through advertisements. In this sense, it is stated that the main function of advertisements is to impose a product, service or an idea on a determined target audience (Tosun, 2017). In today's highly competitive markets, advertisements play an important role in helping firms gain competitive advantage and, on the contrary, to have a bad image (Li, Huang, & Christianson, 2017: Wells, 2014). Since advertising strategies are an important factor in companies' relations with consumers, they are used more and more by companies every day. In fact, advertisements and advertising strategies gain a new dimension with technological innovations. Advertising strategies, which first started to exist in the form of written posters, then continue to exist on TV, radio and finally on the internet or social media. Especially recently, the use of social media has reached large masses, which has been effective in the more intensive use of advertisements on social media (Arora, Bansal, Kandpal, Aswani, & Dwivedi, 2019: Lee & Hong, 2016). According to the data announced in January 2020, it was determined that approximately 4.54 billion people in the world use the internet and 3.8 billion of them actively interact with social media (youtube, twiter, instagram, facebook, etc.). This figure corresponds to approximately 49 per cent of the world population (Digital, 2020). In addition, 90 per cent of companies that actively continue their existence effectively use advertising strategies in social media tools to increase the consumption of their products and services (Lee & Hong, 2016). Thanks to social media tools, medium or small-sized companies also have the opportunity to announce their products and services to large masses (Cole, DeNardin, & Clow, 2017).

The idea that advertising or advertising strategies will definitely increase the sales or profitability of companies does not reflect the reality. Because the reactions of customers to advertisements cannot be determined precisely and clearly (Raziq, et al., 2018). Most studies reveal that scepticism towards advertisements has a direct effect on the attitude towards advertisements (Pan, Meng, & Lee, 2017). Scepticism towards advertising is defined as disbelief in statements or claims in advertisements (Obermiller & Spangenberg, 1998). The fact that advertising scepticism is a subjective concept, that is, whether an advertisement is suspicious or not varies from person to person, makes it difficult to determine the antecedents and effects of this concept (Hardesty, Carlson, & Bearden, 2002). It is stated that scepticism towards advertisement is related to many different factors. For example, there is a positive relationship between advertising scepticism and advertisement avoidance, anger and customer privacy concerns (Baek & Morimoto, 2012). In addition, the most important factor affecting the formation of positive or negative perceptions on suspicion towards advertising is advertising literacy (the ability to distinguish or analyse advertisements), and high levels of advertising literacy may increase the level of suspicion towards advertising and negatively affect consumers' attitudes towards advertisements (Shen, Chiou, Hsiao, Wang, & Li, 2016).

It is understood from the explanations that scepticism towards advertisement is directly related to many factors. For this reason, determining the antecedents and effects of suspicion towards advertising is important in terms of taking measures in favour of the consumer and the firm. Based on the literature, this study will be carried out to determine the antecedents and effects of suspicion in social media advertisements by addressing the suspicion towards advertisement more specifically. Based on national and international literature, it has been determined that exaggerated advertisements directly affect advertising scepticism, while the concepts of brand trust, brand attitude and purchase intention are the factors negatively affected by advertising scepticism. In addition, this study aims to determine that advertising suspicion is not the first factor affecting the factors in favour of the firm and the consumer, but a second factor. In other words, in this study, scepticism towards advertising is considered as both a cause and a consequence.