Navigating Online Ads: How Source Credibility Triggers Consumer Persuasion Knowledge

The objective of this article is to determine the conditions under which two dimensions of source credibility – namely, expertise and trustworthiness – affect the activation and use of consumers’ topic and agent knowledge, which in turn, influence their attitude toward the ad message and purchase intention. This article addresses the gap of an under-researched area in previous empirical research in which topic and agent knowledge should be regarded as separate constructs. This article also contributes to the existing literature through the integration of relatively newly emerging research stream: Persuasion Knowledge Model (PKM) into well-established research area of source credibility.