The advancement of advertising, particularly in the digital age, comes bearing psychological effects on the target group, and in this case, the college student, in terms of their spending habits and financial well-being. Advertising plays a great role in the psychological well-being of the target group by evoking emotions of love, pleasure, and vanity that are powerful drivers of consumer desire and response (Mikołajczak-Degrauwe & Brengman, 2014, p65-73). These emotions are consecutively manipulated in different ways to affect spending behaviour, which affects their financial well-being. With the shift in the consumer consumption culture, buying tends to be taken as a means to satisfy the consumer’s physical needs while providing pleasure and relaxation to the buyer. A vast amount of research has been conducted on the effects of advertisement in various fields like mental health and consumer behaviour, where only a few of them have studied the psychological effects on College Students. The investigation on the psychological influence of advertising on college students provides additional insights, which are important to policy-makers, advertisers, and consumers to adjust their practices to prevent the negative effects of advertising while harnessing its positive effects. To this end, the study will examine the psychological effects of advertising on college students and its influence on their spending habits and financial well-being.
The target group
The target group of the study is college students, a population composed of male and female students from various ethnic groups. The student falls at an average age group of 18-24 years, with a small percentage being older or younger, as seen in the figure below (Okagbue et al., 2020, p 62).
Figure 1 Statistics showing college enrolment by age (Okagbue et al., 2020)
The number of college students enrolled in different institutions around the world is currently at 235 million, which varies between the different regions in both private and public organizations (UNESCO, 2023). With the increment in the youth population and the swelling graduation rates in elementary, junior, and secondary schools, the college intake has faced some dramatic increase, more so in regions like Asia, Latin America, and Africa, which have been significantly supported and influenced by their governments (World Bank, 2023).
College students are characterized by adequate time and financial freedom as compared to other students at various levels. Their curriculum is less demanding, which gives them the advantage of time to explore their experiences and interests. On the other hand, most of them have financial support from their parents, scholarships, or part-time jobs, resulting in a relatively stable budget, which sometimes comes with a surplus. They are also known for their vitality, which means that apart from their academic and extra-curricular activities, they can also engage with the market regarding new products and ideas (Yang & Yan, 2023,p 204). Their consumption patterns are based on intelligent, innovative, cutting-edge, and trendy consumption. This makes them attractive to business advertisements, especially when considering their availability for demand, shopping, access to resources, and ability to share and accept new products and ideas among their peers.
Impact of advertising on college students
Advertising to college students has been known to connect the brand to thousands of young consumers who are at a very important phase in their lives. In this case, advertising refers to a subset of the promotional mix, which forms one component of the four Ps of marketing: product, price, place, and promotion (Bardhan, 2019, p 59). Most of these students in college today are represented by individuals born between the mid-90s to the early 200s, which is ideally represented by millennials and Generation Z. While this generation poses several differences from their predecessors, they also share some similarities like their affinity to modern technologies that form the basis for modern advertisements (Costa, 2014).
Taken as a group, college students represent the second generation of digital natives who were raised in an era of world mass connectivity and social media prevalence. The affinity for technology is known to influence their purchasing power in an age where there is so much information about products out there. In this particular case, social media marketing is paramount among this population. A study on social media usage by college students shows that 98% of college students have more than three social media accounts, representing 39% of total social media usage (Kuzma & Wright, 2013, p 64). These social media pages include Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok, and advertisement is effectively done through encouraging user-generated content, use of influencers, video advertising, and speaking in their voice (Bashir & Malik, 2010, p 10). The effects of this on the students come in a two-way dimension, bearing positive and negative effects, as discussed below;
Consumer involvement
Advertisements on different social media platforms influence the consumer behaviour of college students through the composition of a message that engages them in different ways. Using the consumer involvement theory, consumer behaviour is explained as an effect of advertisements on college students. It provides a way of understanding the psychology and the behavioural needs of the students, with involvement representing the factors of time, attention, effort, and the energy spent by these students when buying, which is classified into four main categories: high emotional involvement, high rational involvement, low emotional involvement, and low rational involvement (Molenaar et al., 2021, p 22). The theory assumes that the variables to support it include interactivity, accessibility, entertainment, and infromativeness, which explains the importance of consumer involvement through advertising. It further explains the definition of consumer buying, which is described as the process by which college students select, buy, use, and dispose of goods and services in the queue to sustain their needs and wants, as seen in the figure below (Yasmeen & Khalid, 2016).
Figure 2 shows the impact of online advertising on the consumer behaviour of students (Yasmeen & Khalid, 2016)
Entertainment
With college students, Muncy & Hunt (2004, p 194) stated that an interesting and entertaining advertisement is likely to be remembered, stating that entertainment increases the effectiveness of the advertisement. Using the Mood management theory, the consumption of information and messages is set according to the Mood of the college students, where the theory hypothesizes that their state of mind influences the consumption of these advertisements (Reinecke, 2016, p 1271). The theory utilizes the consumption of information in two ways: the traditional method, which involves physical distraction through activities like walking, and the modern method, on the other hand, which is represented by the current way of life with an overload of media information. In this case, the media is known to be an environment that fills the hedonic need of an initial selection of negating the ill, and when it is successful, the same can be used to handle situations in the future. The same applies to advertising, where an advertisement containing entertainment is used to stimulate the Mood of these college students, minimizing their likelihood of falling into a negative state. The theory assumes that college students are not necessarily aware of the concept of motivation in the advertisement, but the selection on an intuition basis does it for them and selects the media exposure, which leads to positive engagement with the brand.
Familiarity
Familiarity refers to the number of product or service activities that a customer can relate to, which are a result of direct interaction with the brand through advertising, word of mouth, or consumption. It is equivalent to knowledge of the product or service, relating to either experience or knowledge. Ballester & Sicilia (2012, p33) presented a review of literature that shows that experience, knowledge, and familiarity are closely related factors that define brand familiarity as the accumulated correlated experiences that college students have with a brand and that enable them to relate positively with the brand. The concept is further explained using the Mere exposure theory, which states that repetition creates familiarity, and familiarity, on the other hand, positively influences the brand. The theory posits that the more college students are exposed to an advertisement, the more they will grow familiar with it and consecutively come to like it and purchase it.
Spending habits and Financial well-being
Advertisements can affect the students’ buying behaviour so that money can be spent according to the frequency and quality of the advertisement, which can result in impulse buying, leading to poor spending habits (Sama, 2019). Advertising presents an important extrinsic factor that signals the reality of a product to the student, which brings the idea of persuasion and manipulation, where persuasion is the advancement of the positions involved and refers to prosocial endeavours that guide the receiver of the message to accept the truth. In contrast, manipulation, on the other hand, is described as a manipulative appeal, which, if adopted, will negatively impact the persuasive part of the message (Beauchamp & Biederman, 2004, p2). Persuasive knowledge influences the attitude of college students toward an advertisement, resulting in an influence on their buying decisions, as seen in the figure below (Beauchamp & Biederman, 2004, p7)
Figure 3 Relationship between persuasion and compulsive buying (Beauchamp & Biederman, 2004)
Advertising has given rise to materialism and consumerism in society, which is attributed to the use of persuasive knowledge. In this case, students who are exposed to advertising content display strong materialistic values, with a greater desire to purchase these products, whose effect is much stronger when advertisements are perceived as an accurate portrayal of real life. The materialistic and consumerism aspects are different in different students, which is stronger in students from deprived backgrounds who feel they cannot afford the affluent lifestyle promoted in the advertisements, and consequently, they mack the purchasing power as driven by their background, and therefore they feel like they do not meet the social standards as displayed by the society (Maison & Adamczyk, 2020, p 2528). Materialism and consumerism affect the spending habits of college students, whether they are more inclined to purchase the advertised goods rather than save money. These factors also affect consumer relations and their financial literacy, which results in debts, where the students might find themselves borrowing money to purchase these goods.
Recommendations
Advertisers – Several small things can be made big through the right advertising method. It is important for advertisers to focus on federal truths, making advertisements honest and non-deceptive. The subject claims that are released to the college student must be adequately substantiated to prevent manipulative persuasion. Advertisers should avoid languages that overstate the benefits of the products and avoid mentioning their competitors in the advertisements. These companies should get copyright permission to use someone else’s music, art, or photographs, and more so in customer endorsement and testimonials. In this way, the company will ensure that the advertisement is legit and will not be misleading to the people. The sales advertisements and coupons that include price reductions of product increments should be legit deals to prevent deception of the college students that could lead to loss of money. Advertisers should be careful while using the word free which is used by most agencies to prey on their consumers. Advertisers should be careful about discrimination practices to take care of students from various backgrounds, protecting their social image and reputation.
Policymakers– the regulators should come up with strict rules to govern the advertising companies against misleading college students, especially from high-risk ads. The claims of every advertiser must be thoroughly screened before they are included in the advertisement channels and the social media platforms where these college students get to access them. Policymakers should regulate advertising companies’ deals to ensure that they follow the set consumer rules to avoid consumer defection. They should be at the forefront of charging the advertisers who go against the rules, and those who promote risky advertisements to college students, those who offer free and risk-free trials of gadgets to the students and, in turn, collect their credit cards and charge them secretly. They should take a look at the return process for products that are mostly on offer, which is accompanied by a lengthy and fine-inclusive process, where the students end up losing more money than they could have spent during the purchase of the item.
College students– we have seen the effect of advertising on spending and the financial well-being of college students. Just as advertisements promote materialism and consumerism, college students can work to limit the influence of advertisements. The students should not omit any key information on the advertisements, including the conditions of the offers. Before making a purchase decision, they should ensure that the pricing is clear and related to the product that is being advertised, including all the non-optional charges. They are advised that they should not exaggerate the capability of the performance of the advertised products, bearing in mind that advertising is all about the presentation of a product in the best way possible. They should ensure that the claims about the advertisements are clear, and they should look for enough evidence before making the purchase decision. Sometimes, it is difficult to get students off advertisements, and therefore, it is important for parents and teachers to frequently discuss matters related to advertisements with these students, which weakens the influence of advertisements on the materialism and consumerism effect of the students.
Conclusion
The results of the study present a direct relationship between advertisement and negative spending habits as well as the financial well-being of college students. Advertising plays a major role in influencing buying behaviour by providing entertainment and familiarity, as seen in the practical application of the theories in the study. However, these purchases result in materialism and consumerism, which result in poor spending habits and the negative financial well-being of the students. The results of the study should motivate the advertisers, the policy makers, and the students to make solid decisions and reduce their spending habits as influenced by the advertisements, hence making solid decisions that affect their financial well-being. Therefore, advertising on college student results affects their spending habits, consequently affecting their financial well-being due to overspending.
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