With the astonishing speed of smartphone and application [app] development, mobile app sponsorship is gaining popularity as a tactic of strategic brand communication and cause-related marketing, especially in the area of health. Smartphone apps provide a high degree of interactivity, which gives users a great deal of control over technology in addition to receiving personalized feedback based on their input. Despite a significant increase of mobile marketing and sponsorship spending, concerns about information privacy are growing in mobile apps. Mobile app sponsorship fosters communities of customers centered on their brand and helps them manage different health issues. It also curates personal customer data and tailors advertising messages and marketing initiatives to reach targeted audiences. However, there is a lack of research explaining how corporate app sponsors are evaluated and what attributions users generate in interactive mobile environments when evaluating the sponsor and the app. Therefore, drawing on the assumptions of attribution theory, this research project examined the effects of three factors in the context of mobile health (mHealth) apps mediated by sponsor motive attributions: visibility (or obtrusiveness) of a sponsor, app personalization pertaining to users’ data sharing within a mHealth app interface, and users’ control over the information sharing option. The present study employed a mixed factorial online experiment, which manipulated the type of sponsor obtrusiveness (high vs. less vs. no visibility), the scope of customization based on personal information sharing (more vs. less), user control over the information sharing (high vs. low), and message repetition (three times). A total of 252 college students participated in the online experiment via a student research pool and 467 responses were collected from the general population panel sample via the Qualtrics online survey platform to replicate the findings of the online experiment study with the student sample. The results indicated that sponsor visibility in the app interface significantly influenced attitudes towards the sponsor, mHealth app credibility, and intentions to download and use for the mHealth app in both student and general population samples. These effects were mediated by participants’ attributions about sponsors’ altruistic and self-serving motives. The degrees of personal information sharing and user control were not found to produce negative responses from users. However, higher user control was associated with more positive sponsor attitudes, higher app credibility, and higher download and usage intentions when sponsorship messages were highly visible in the general population panel sample. Also, indirect effects of personal information sharing moderated by user control on sponsor attitudes and app evaluations mediated by altruistic motive attributions were significant in the condition of high app sponsorship visibility. The findings from this study broaden the scope of attribution theory from the perspective of sponsorship in new media, such as mobile health apps. In particular, it emphasizes the importance of cognitive responses using mobile health app sponsorship, especially the important roles of consumer attributions of sponsor motive on attitudes towards the sponsor, mHealth app credibility, and download and usage intentions for the mHealth app.
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