The Effects of Audience Knowledge on Message Processing of Editorial Content

Abstract

Marketing communications practitioners of modern enterprises recognize that creating mediated messages to audiences is a strategic communication to be leveraged, not simply managed. This study investigates how audiences' knowledge structures affect their message processing of editorial content. A set of laboratory experiments finds support for the proposed hypotheses in the domain of subjective and objective knowledge and message processing of editorial content. While audiences' objective knowledge determines how much elaboration they actually are able to perform, their subjective knowledge facilitates general thoughts. Audiences' knowledge structures direct how they process received messages while objective knowledge rather than subjective knowledge predicts audiences' conation; high levels of objective knowledge have a detrimental impact on audiences' purchase intents.

Keywords:

• Audience knowledge
• editorial content
• message processing