• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.25-64
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• 2008

Third-Party awards are growing in popularity. They are the hit product of the year chosen by The Korea Economic Daily, the best 10 products of the year chosen by Sports paper, the best hit product chosen by consulting firm and the best venture company of the year chosen by Information and Communication Ministry. Then these questions may be followed. Why industry likes this type of advertisement? Does this type of advertisement influences consumers' purchase intention? And if it does, how? Many researchers have been interested in external cue of product quality by focusing research effort on brand, price, producer, warranty etc. However, important but under-explored area is the role of third-party reference for signaling product quality. This paper comes from the idea that the third-party reference may signal consumers like manufacturer brand, product brand, product price, and shop brand. We develop a related theories to address research questions and drive some research hypotheses based on the previous studies probing source credibility, attribution, and signal theory. We put more emphasis on source credibility. We conducted the research based on 3x2x2x2 between group factorial design to explore causal relationship between the third party award winning advertising(real, fictional, no) and the purchase intention of consumers exposed to other information simultaneously such as product type(experience, search), distribution channel(direct, indirect) and perceived price(high, low). Since subjects are divided into 2 groups based on the means of response without extra experimental stimulus in case of perceived price. 12 different advertisements are used for conducting this study. The results are followings. First, the source credibility of the third party goes up, consumers' purchase intention would go up. It seems that consumers think the credibility of the third-party most when they are exposed to the third party award winning advertisement. Second, the product type does moderate the relationship between the third-party award winning advertisement and purchase intention. And the type of the distribution channel also moderates this relationship. The consumers' purchase intention goes up higher when they buy experience good and there is significant difference of purchase intention when consumers are exposed to direct channel treatment condition. But, perceived price has nothing to do with the third-party winning advertisement context for raising consumer intention to buy advertised product.