Studies of advertising beliefs and attitudes are crucial because these measures are shown to affect brand attitudes and purchase intentions. Previous studies in this area used either student or general consumers samples; no comparisons were made between the two groups. Therefore, it is not known whether and to what extent responses of student samples are likely to differ from those of general consumers. Differences would indicate that the two segments view advertising dissimilarly. However, by applying covariance structure analysis on a sample of students and a sample of general consumers from India, our study found no significant differences between them in their beliefs toward advertising in general, attitudes toward the institution of advertising, attitudes toward the instrument of advertising, or attitudes toward advertising in general
