ABSTRACT
The act of Liking online content has become a routine task in day-to-day interactions with family, friends, colleagues, and companies who advertise online. Consequently, traditional advertising models such as response hierarchy models should be translated cautiously to social media contexts. Cognitive theories propose that viewers' attitude formation toward the object of an ad is mediated by their cognitive elaboration of the arguments presented in a persuasive communication. The introduction of emotional response as a mediator for attitude formation and as a predictor of behavioral outcomes indicates that focusing exclusively on cognitive processes impedes our understanding of consumer behavior in its entirety. The chapter reviews the challenges traditional response hierarchy models are facing and then proposes a new interactive response model for advertising in the era of social media. Traditional response hierarchy models of marketing communication propose that consumers move through at least three stages that can be aggregated into the cognitive stage, the affective stage and the behavioral stage.
