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How Brand Managers Can Maximize Engagement with ASMR YouTube Content: Influencers Who Give You the “Tingles” through Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response Cues
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This qualitative exploratory study investigated the embodied experiences and the meanings of Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) from the viewer’s perspective. ASMR research has been sparse and largely quantitative, assuming it to be a predominantly fixed physiological response of “tingles”, despite the acronym being rooted in pseudoscience. A qualitative research design was adopted to facilitate the exploratory nature of the study in this under-researched area. In contrast to the mostly survey-based research on ASMR, this study employed semi-structured interviews as a means to understand the lived experience of ASMR and to promote participant agency. Six self-identifying ASMR consumers were recruited using a mixture of snowball and opportunity sampling. Semi-structured interviews were conducted both in person and using Skype to facilitate transnational data collection. Interview transcripts were analysed using an inductive, data-driven approach to thematic analysis. The analysis suggests that ASMR is felt to provide a social environment of comfort rather than a solely physiological-based experience. Three key themes emerged: who and what defines ASMR? (reflecting the variety of what was classed as ASMR and what content was consumed to produce the response); “real” intimacy tailored to me (reflecting the idiosyncratic perception of intimacy made possible through ASMR); and emotional relief on my terms (reflecting the role of ASMR in self-soothing). The present data reflect a rich, complex experience of the ASMR consumer, pointing to potential wider applications and informing further research.
Affiliate or partnership marketing programs are a performance-based approach to online marketing whereby brands only pay when a sale occurs and is traced back to the affiliate who made it happen. Affiliate marketing programs conquered Web 2.0 and are now one of the most used channels for marketers and publishers online. Despite their success, affiliate marketing programs are exposed to different and problematic degrees of falsity which finally threaten both consumers and brands. Acknowledging the lack of strategic and academic guidance about how to prevent and handle affiliate frauds, in this article we provide an original classification differentiating between noninfluencer and influencer falsity. We describe the direct and indirect costs that the various techniques belonging to each category cause and outline the best strategies that brands can implement to preserve their economic and reputational integrity. We then propose a two-stage affiliate listening protocol and show its applicability with an illustrative case on real influencer affiliate data. We offer several insights to marketers who need to manage their brands in an era of falsity, suggesting that continuous affiliate listening is needed to identify falsity in affiliate marketing programs and carefully select the affiliate influencers to partner with.
Sponsored videos have rapidly emerged as an important marketing tool as video sharing platforms and the popularity of video influencers have grown. However, little research explores how sponsored videos' design strategies affect viewer engagement. Using field data, this study highlights influencers' authenticity dilemma in sponsored video design and tests which features drive digital engagement. Specifically, this study conceptualizes and empirically tests a comprehensive framework, involving passion-and transparency-based strategies as well as platform-and brand-factors, to determine how influencers can best manage the authenticity dilemma. Results show that explicitly disclosing brand sponsorship, alone, and in combination with platform-generated disclosure, positively impacts digital engagement, indicating an evolution in consumer persuasion knowledge. Early brand appearance, high video customization, and influencers' subjective endorsements, such as sharing personal experiences or opinions about the sponsored product, impair sponsored videos' digital engagement. In addition to contributing theoretical insights on authenticity management strategies and sponsorship disclosure in influencer videos, this research offers practical recommendations to influencers on how to design more engaging sponsored videos.
There is both public and scholarly concern that (passive) social media use decreases well-being by providing a fertile ground for harmful (upward) social comparison and envy. The present review critically summarizes evidence on this assumption. We first comprehensively synthesize existing evidence, including both prior reviews and the most recent publications (2019 to 2021). Results show that earlier research finds social comparison and envy to be common on social media and linked to lower well-being. Yet, increasingly, newer studies contradict this conclusion, finding positive links to well-being as well as heterogeneous, person-specific, conditional, and reverse or reciprocal effects. The review identifies four critical conceptual and methodological limitations of existing evidence, which offer new impulses for future research.
How do people react to business model innovation (BMI) announcements on social media? Is the analysis of social media reactions to BMI announcements a fruitful method for assessing the potential and pitfalls of BMIs? This research provides a novel perspective by answering these questions using a multi-case study approach. Our results show that social media reactions to BMI announcements can provide first indications of the success or failure of a BMI as well as initial information on how to further adjust the BMI. However, our results also indicate that classical means of assessing the success of innovations (i.e., through assessing the valence of user reactions) are not effective in the context of BMIs.
Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) is a tingling, static-like sensation in response to specific triggering audio and visual stimuli. Within recent years, ASMR has mostly been associated with videos on YouTube (technologically mediated ASMR) dedicated to make the users “tingle”, relax, and feel at ease. In this article, I explore the ambiguity of technology in relation to the ASMR experience and theoretically investigate how viewer-listeners might struggle to obtain an intimate and parasocial interaction in a technologically mediated ASMR context. The article introduces four types of intimacies as well as theoretical concepts of mediated intimacy, immediacy, and parasocial interaction, and I discuss these intimacies and concepts in relation to illustrative comments by some of the pacesetting power users of ASMR.
Purpose
Guided by a synthesis of social norms theory (SNT), the social identity model of deindividuation effects (SIDE) and information cascades theory (ICT), this study aims to unveil the mechanism underlying the role of social norms in shaping consumer responses to woke advertising in the algorithmic social media environment.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper analyzed 125,481 unique comments on a woke campaign, which represented the dynamic social norms condition in which the prominence of popularity information sets a social norm that can be passed on through a sequential commenting process. Also, this paper conducted an experiment with two conditions, namely, static social norms condition, representing a situation in which the prominence of popularity information sets a social norm through a non-sequential commenting process; without social norms condition, epitomizing the situation in which there is no popularity information that can set a social norm.
Findings
The results revealed that when evaluating a social media-based woke ad, depersonalized consumers in a dynamic social norms condition were more likely to be influenced by the prevailing norms than those in a static social norms condition were.
Originality/value
Through the lens of ICT, this research extends SNT and SIDE by detailing the procedure regarding how perceived social norms shape the formation of consumer opinions in a sequential fashion.
Brands allocate their social media advertising across multiple platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Because consumers use multiple social media, brand communications on one platform could generate engagement within the same platform (direct effects) and potentially impact engagement with the brand on the other platforms (spillover effects). Additionally, past engagement with a post on a platform could sustain into the future, thereby improving the longevity of posts (carryover effects). These effects could also vary across platforms. Drawing on recent advertising literature, the authors propose and test differential carryover, spillover, and direct effects within and across social media. The empirical analysis indicates that these effects exist and are significant, supporting the propositions presented. The analysis provides generalizable guidelines to social media marketers on the effectiveness of the various platforms at sustaining a post and at creating direct and spillover effects across other platforms. Finally, the study also exemplifies a resource allocation model for brands to use when allocating their efforts across the various social media platforms to maximize both consumer engagement and the firm’s return on social media investment.
Based on a systematic literature (SLR) and content analysis, this article offers a critical review of customer engagement (CE) research in English and Chinese hospitality and tourism management literature. This article discusses CE research by identifying temporal scope, country of origin distributions, theoretical perspectives and conceptualizations. Research streams of CE are also discussed from the perspective of context, mode and process, antecedents and consequences. The current study suggests that CE is an important research topic in the hospitality and tourism field. There has been a shift from “customer” to “tourist” and “visitor”. CE in hospitality and tourism has been explored both in the context of offline and online. This study provides specific theoretical implications and suggestions for future research.
Popularity on YouTube is an important metric for influencers and brands. It is linked to video relevance, content, and features that attract audience attention and interest. We present and test a model of YouTube video popularity drivers that trigger several engagement actions (i.e., number of views, likes, dislikes, and comments). These drivers include characteristics—such as language elements, linguistic style, subjectivity, emotion valence, and video category—that influence online video popularity on YouTube. An analysis of a database comprising more than 11,000 videos from 150 digital influencers shows that several factors help to boost the number of views, likes/dislikes, and comments. We find that medium‐length and long videos posted during non‐business hours and weekdays and those using a subjective language style, less‐active events, and temporal indications are more likely to receive views, likes, and comments. Moreover, the use of negative or low‐arousal emotion helps to promote a general interest in a YouTube video.
Afforded by new digital technologies, consumer interactions are breaking the boundaries of basic assumptions about interpersonal communication, mass communication, and the concepts arising from the two. By looking into social media influencer–follower relations, this study suggests that the long-held conventional concept of parasocial relation no longer fully encompasses the evolving contemporary human interactions and related relations. The current analysis recommends an updated notion and theorization—a trans-parasocial relation—to capture a collectively reciprocal, (a)synchronously interactive, and co-created relation between influencers and their captive followers. This trans-parasocial relation concept offers a foundation on which new communicative and advertising theories can be developed to explicate new forms of social interactions and consumer behavior. More importantly, in view of this trans-parasocial relation, assumptions of the existing persuasion theory—that is, the persuasion knowledge model—need to be reassessed. The current findings demonstrate that persuasion knowledge does not always negatively affect advertising outcomes. Instead, followers indicate mostly benign attitudes toward influencer-sponsored posts, interpret influencers’ sponsorship disclosures as genuine and transparent, and internalize disclosure actions as inspiring and admirable. This study further identifies and elucidates several psychological mechanisms that account for followers’ overall appreciation of influencer-sponsored posts: positive bias, verification by cross-validation, and inspirational internalization.
Prior research has assumed that touch has a persuasive effect only if it provides attribute or structural information about a product. Under this view, the role of touch as a persuasive tool is limited. The main purpose of this research is to investigate the persuasive influence of touch as an affective tool in the absence of useful product-related information. The authors find that for people who are motivated to touch because it is fun or interesting, a communication that incorporates touch leads to increased affective response and increased persuasion, particularly when the touch provides neutral or positive sensory feedback. People who are not motivated to touch for fun will also be persuaded by a communication that incorporates touch when they are able to make sense of how the touch is related to the message. The authors explore the effectiveness of different types of touch in generating an affective response, and they replicate the effects on attitudes and behavior in a real-world setting. This research suggests that the marketing implications of touch are more substantial than previously believed. The authors present research implications for direct marketing, product packaging, point-of-purchase displays, and print advertising.
Social Media Influencers (SMIs) are micro‐celebrities with large followings on social media platforms who engage consumers and hold the potential to promote customer‐brand relationships across different product categories. SMIs have an existing relationship of trust with consumers, and consumers seek out the content created by SMIs for valuable information and advice. This study explores the process of brand engagement between consumers and brands in the digital content marketing environment, specifically examining the research question: Do SMIs act as a route to brand engagement for their followers? The context for this study is the beauty community on YouTube; over 60,000 user comments were analyzed through automated text analysis. This study is among the first to provide empirical evidence that SMIs do act as a route to brand engagement through the three dimensions of cognitive processing, affection and activation.
Several brands are striving in their endeavors to find new ways to improve their consumer engagement through social media. They are using different tools including influencer marketing through social networking sites (SNSs). Therefore, this chapter addresses a gap in the academic literature as it distinguishes between two types of online influencers. The researchers investigate the effects of celebrity endorsers' and of micro influencers' posts on a brand's page in Instagram. They examine the number of followers, clicks, comments and likes that are generated following their influencer marketing. The results suggest that both influencers have generated varying levels and types of interactions. In sum, this exploratory study revealed that the chosen celebrity's posts attracted more followers to the brand's Instagram page, when compared to the micro influencer's publications. However, the latter has garnered more clicks, comments and likes, thereby increasing the consumer-brand engagement through social media. In conclusion, this contribution identifies future research avenues relating to influencer marketing.
The amount of literature on the effects of disclosing sponsored content has increased greatly in recent years. Although the literature provides valuable insights into the effects of disclosing sponsored content, several research gaps remain, such as inconclusive findings, boundary conditions, and the mechanisms that explain how disclosures work. This article offers a meta-analysis of 61 papers that use 57 distinct data sets to address these research gaps. The results showed that disclosing sponsored content reduced brand attitudes, credibility, and source evaluation but increased recognition, persuasion knowledge, and resistance. Disclosure content, timing, and awareness, as well as product and sample characteristics, provide boundary conditions for the positive and negative effects of disclosures. A path model that tested the mechanism of disclosing sponsored content showed that, as suggested by memory priming effect, recognition of sponsored content increased memory but did not influence evaluation. Moreover, the understanding of sponsored content influenced evaluation, but memory remained unaffected, which corresponds to the flexible correction approach (i.e., consumers try to correct their answer to limit persuasive effects).
Fashion and beauty brands leverage social media influencers to shape purchasing decisions, improve cost effectiveness, and reach wider audiences. New conventional wisdom has brands moving away from mega influencers toward micro influencers due to greater perceived relatability and trustworthiness. This study employs a novel computational approach integrating network analysis and computational text analysis to understand differences in content and its diffusion through mega and micro influencer Twitter networks. Findings debunk conventional wisdom that micro influencers can best fill unique roles by forging intimate, emotion-laden interpersonal connections. While micro influencers are more central to two-way dialogue within their networks, mega influencers garner more affect directed towards them indicating greater trust. Practical implications for the continued value of mega influencers and the identification and development of promising micro influencers are discussed.
Influencer marketing is the practice of compensating individuals for posting about a product or service on social media. Influencer marketing is on the rise, and many marketers now plan either to start using influencers or to increase their use of them in their media mixes. Despite such growth, relatively little strategic or academic insight exists that is specific to influencers. In this article, we describe the roots of influencer marketing and the many different types of influencers that now exist. We identify influencers’ three functional components: the audience, the endorser, and the social media manager. We then detail for each of these components the different sources of value influencers potentially offer marketers. We draw on relevant academic research to offer advice about how to leverage each component strategically. We close by describing how the interplay of these functional components makes influencers a potentially powerful—and undervalued—marketing tool.
There are growing discussions of social media influencers and their effectiveness in endorsing products. Further, recent policy regulations are requiring social media influencers to disclose sponsored content when using a form of native advertising. This research examined the effect of macro-influencers (high likes) and micro-influencers (low likes) and their disclosure of native advertising sponsorship on consumer evaluations of products. Results from a 2 × 2 experiment first show that consumers exposed to the micro-influencer condition report higher levels of product knowledge, and consumers exposed to the disclosure condition reported the products endorsed by social media influencers to be more attractive. The results also show that when exposed to micro-influencers who disclose, consumers have higher levels of purchase intentions than when exposed to macro-influencers who do not disclose, as well as higher purchase intentions than for posts where sponsorship is not disclosed by influencers. The important findings of this research for theory, practice and policy are discussed.
With the increasing digitalization and datafication of consumption brought by platforms such as Amazon, Netflix and Spotify, digital traces of taste are constantly generated as by-products of consumers' everyday communications and activities. However, these data have not been fully exploited in the cross-disciplinary study of taste phenomena. This paper represents a first attempt to develop a comprehensive methodological framework for “augmenting” taste research through the analysis of digital traces. The proposed framework is theory-driven, multi-method, context-sensitive, and reflexive about platforms' affordances. Three distinct methodological pathways are examined, contributing to research on taste cultures, regimes and experiences. Empirical data about Italian hip-hop culture on YouTube are employed for illustrative purposes. Key methodological and theoretical implications for consumer research are discussed.
While social media influencers are gleaning increasing trust and investment from brands, advertisers, and followers, insights on the role of influencers in adolescents’ relationship formation and consumption behaviors are still rare. Drawing on the literatures of influencer content value, influencer credibility, parental mediation, and parasocial relationship (PSR), this study proposed a conceptual model that expounds the appeal of influencers among adolescents. To test the model, we administered an online survey – recruited in proportion to demographic quotas (i.e., age, gender and ethnicity) – among 500 United States adolescents (aged 10- to 19-years old) via Qualtrics panel. Results revealed that, the entertainment value of influencer-generated content, influencer expertise, trustworthiness, attractiveness, and followers’ perceived similarity to their favorite influencers, are positively related to the perceived PSR between adolescent followers and their favorite influencers, which in turn, are associated with adolescents’ materialistic views and purchase intentions. We also explored the role of parental mediation of adolescents’ social media use in their PSR with influencers. Results indicate that, neither active mediation nor restrictive mediation is related to the PSR between adolescents and influencers. Active mediation is negatively associated with adolescents’ materialism, whereas restrictive mediation is positively related to adolescents’ purchase intentions toward influencer-promoted products. This study proposed and tested a comprehensive conceptual model that accounts for the role of influencers in adolescent followers’ materialism and purchase intentions. This study yields three major theoretical contributions. First, it adopts and applies the concept of PSR from the literature of media psychology to explicate influencers’ appeal among adolescents, which lays a theoretical foundation for future research on the impact of influencers. Second, it advances the current literature on social media influencers by specifying key contributing factors for the development of adolescents’ PSR with influencers. Lastly, it explores the roles of the two facets of parental mediation – active and restrictive mediation – in the appeal of influencers among adolescents, which offers directions for future research of parental mediation in the influencer context.
This paper demonstrates how to use the R package stm for structural topic modeling. The structural topic model allows researchers to flexibly estimate a topic model that includes document-level metadata. Estimation is accomplished through a fast variational approximation. The stm package provides many useful features, including rich ways to explore topics, estimate uncertainty, and visualize quantities of interest.
The advertising and marketing literature have established that celebrity endorsements constitute an effective way to enhance attitudes toward brands and increase purchase intents. However, there are no relevant studies on digital influencers. This study addresses the research gap by examining the effect of digital influencers' attractiveness and the effect of the congruence between a digital influencer and a brand on consumer attitudes and purchase intentions. By applying structural equation modeling to a sample of 307 followers of digital influencers, a model was tested and group analysis was performed for two categories (“entertainment & video games” and “fashion & beauty”). The results show that both brand attitudes and purchase intentions are influenced by the digital influencer's attractiveness (which includes both likeability and familiarity) and by the congruence between the digital influencer and the brand. This study makes several contributions to both theory and practice, which are highlighted in this paper.
Food live streaming shopping, which features a host eating and promoting the products to viewers, has become a new form of food marketing. In three studies, the authors examine the impact of content, influencer, and channel factors of mukbang live streaming on consumers’ perceived value and subsequent impulse purchase and food consumption behavior. Study 1, an experiment with 216 participants, reveals that a non–autonomous sensory meridian response (non-ASMR) video in which the mukbanger talks to viewers while eating regular (i.e., nonjunk) food is more influential in enhancing the video's perceived value and increasing impulse purchase and consumption. Study 2, with 624 participants, introduces influencer factors into the experiment. It shows that a credible and parasocial influencer significantly affects consumers’ perceived value, regardless of the food featured, resulting in impulse purchase and consumption. Study 3, which excludes the content factors fully mediated by influencer factors, examines the impact of the live streaming influencer and the shopping platform on perceived value and food well-being. A cross-sectional survey of 630 respondents finds that channel factors (food product offerings and convenience) and influencer factors (credibility and parasocial relationship) significantly enhance consumers’ perceived value, leading to impulse purchase and overconsumption. The authors provide theoretical and practical implications to enrich future research and responsible business practices in online food marketing.
Drawing upon the thriving brand co-creation perspective, our study explores the co-creation of family business brand (FBB) meanings with external stakeholders. Through a mixed method analysis that combines structural topic modelling and interpretative grounded theorizing, we analyse 12,039 newspaper articles, covering a period of 30 years, to show how journalists co-created intended and unintended family business brand meanings. Our findings reveal seven unique FBB discourses, and a set of five discursive strategies (echoing, educating, narrativizing, unveiling and reframing) embedded in two discursive mechanisms (FBB meanings consolidation and FBB meanings unravelling) that journalists actuate in their press coverage of family businesses. Thus, our paper contributes to the family business and brand co-creation literatures theorizing and contextualizing the role of an overlooked actor in the FBB ecosystem, promotes a way to methodologically apply big-data-friendly analysis in the family business field, and offers managerial implications.
Endorsers are highly effective in promoting customer–brand engagement. New endorsers are emerging owing to the digital explosion. Who promotes brands better - mega or macro-influencers? Traditional celebrities can represent both types of endorsers (mega and macro) with a strong online presence but varying numbers of followers. This study conducted an online survey to determine the antecedents and consequences of endorsers' participation in marketing and communication strategies. The results of path analysis showed that brand and endorser credibility played a significant role in determining customer brand engagement and brand equity. Endorser credibility impacted brand equity only in the case of mega-influencers. Smaller influencers exhibited higher prowess than celebrities to engage customers, thus suggesting that “less is more.”
Emerging literature on social media influencers (SMIs) identifies their potential to help brands gain attention and build credibility with consumers, in particular as brands respond to the growing consumer expectation of a commitment to social causes. We propose a social networks approach to the study of paid SMIs and implement it in veganism cause-related communities on Instagram. Findings identify clusters, echo chambers of influencers promoting similar products, associated with different facets of the cause community. Findings illustrate the value of a different type of SMI who bridges across influencers’ clusters and their following consumers. The study reveals the power of nano-influencers, who exhibited higher betweenness centrality levels, that is, their bridging position in the network. Conceptually, this study connects network scholarship to the study of paid influencers. We discuss methodological and practical implications of the potential role of influencers in brand attempts to engage with online cause communities.
SMR has attracted considerable attention in social media and advertising practices, but it lacks empirical investigation within marketing science. This study suggests applying ASMR in the design of interactions in relationships between organizations and customers in order to shorten spatial distance evoked by digitization. This experimental study comprises the first empirical investigation of ASMR in the context of relationship marketing with a focus on perceived customer intimacy. The findings demonstrate that the level of perceived customer intimacy depends on individuals’ extraversion and agreeableness, and ASMR may entail the ability to positively influence this intimacy, but is influenced by further variables.
Purpose
This study examined how social media influencers create and leverage followers' attachment to deliver marketing messages by applying human brand theory and attachment theory.
Design/methodology/approach
An online self-administered survey by 490 US adults who are Millennials (27–40) or Generation Z (18–26) in 2020 and currently following any specific social media influencer was conducted and analyzed.
Findings
The results suggest that homophily, social presence and attractiveness create a greater attachment. Attachment enhances followers' loyalty to the influencer and advertising credibility and reduces their resistance to advertising, whereas it does not affect advertising perception.
Research limitations/implications
This study suggests the significance of emotional bonding which explains the recent industry shifts targeting “micro-influencers” and long-term partnerships. The attachment to the influencer leads the followers to become loyal, credit marketing messages and lower the resistance without altering the perception as advertising.
Originality/value
This study identifies how attachment affects the followers' perception and response to the marketing message delivered by the influencer while previous studies were limited to the formulation process of attachment.
Background
Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) is a pleasant physiological tingling sensation induced by certain visual and auditory triggers. ASMR has been shown to reduce stress and increase positive mood, but its effects have not yet been studied in populations with clinically severe symptoms. The present study aimed to investigate whether the experience of ASMR improved mood and reduced arousal in people with and without insomnia and depression symptoms.
Methods
1,037 participants (18-66 years) completed online questionnaires assessing insomnia and depression symptom severity followed by questionnaires on current mood and arousal levels before and after watching an ASMR video. The independent variables were the participant's group (insomnia, depression, insomnia and depression combined or control) and whether they experienced ASMR during the video. The dependent variables were the change in mood and arousal levels after watching the video.
Results
As predicted, all participants showed significantly increased relaxation and improved mood after watching the video with the largest effects for participants who experienced ASMR and for participants in the combined and depression groups. No difference was found between the insomnia and control groups.
Limitations
It is not known how many participants were familiar with ASMR videos prior to taking part in the study (nor whether this is important). Also, the categorization of participants into the ASMR group was based on self-report and thus, not verified.
Conclusions
Results suggest that ASMR videos have the potential to be used to improve mood and reduce arousal with implications for alleviating symptoms of insomnia and depression.
This study aims to integrate the literature on social media influencers into a framework that classifies (potential) social media influencers and highlights their features. Previous classifications mainly focused on the measurable characteristics of social media influencers as determined either by scholars or consumers. In reality, though, the social impact of an influencer evolves as an interaction between his/her own goals and motivations and audience's perceptions and attributions. This study proposes a conceptual classification that combines the characteristics of social media influencers with audience’s perceptions of the social media influencer. The proposed classification consists of three types of top social media influencers – Passionate Business Influencers, Passionate Influencers and Celebrity Influencers and two types of potential social media influencers - Dreaming Business Dormants and Passionate Topic Enthusiasts. The differences between them are explained by celebrity status, authenticity and received revenues. The implications of our framework for marketers and research directions are discussed.
The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement ignited divergent social media reactions and conversations. Addressing the importance of message sources, this study aims to (1) compare audience reactions toward BLM content posted by brands and by influencers with brand sponsorship and (2) apply computational methods in influencer marketing to examine a large volume of social media texts qualitatively and quantitatively. A total of 32,702 comments on 110 Instagram posts on BLM were collected and analyzed through both human efforts and machine-learning algorithms. As a result, we found that black-influencer-created BLM attracted higher consumer engagement than posts by nonblack influencers and brands. Moreover, we generated seven different themes among which brands received the highest percentages of criticism, demands for more proactive actions, and purchase/boycott intentions. Influencers had more comments that reflected personal stories and emotion regarding BLM. Black influencers in particular received the highest percentage of praise and appreciation. Finally, comments on brands’ BLM posts embedded the highest proportion of negative sentiment, while those of black influencers’ posts were predominantly positive. Therefore, the comparisons of BLM sources elucidate the promising potential of influencers in communicating corporate social responsibility (CSR) messages of racial equality—a topic which engenders high relevance to every individual in our society.
Social media influencer (SMI) advertising is on the rise; however, extant theory regarding the determinants of SMI advertising effectiveness is undeveloped. The present research establishes when and how the type of SMI based on the number of followers influences SMI advertising effectiveness. Specifically, the findings of four experimental studies show that micro-influencers (those who have 10,000 to 100,000 followers) are more persuasive than mega-influencers (those who have more than 1 million followers) because endorsements by micro-influencers (versus mega-influencers) bestow higher perceptions of authenticity on the endorsed brand, which “rubs off” from the perceptions regarding influencer authenticity. However, this differential effect of SMI type through influencer and brand authenticity occurs only when the endorsed product is perceived as hedonic (as opposed to utilitarian) consumption. From a theoretical perspective, these findings extend prior research on how endorsements from different SMI types vary in terms of their persuasiveness, shed light on the underlying mechanism, and identify consumption type as an important boundary condition. From a practical perspective, we offer managerial implications for enhancing the effectiveness of SMI advertising strategies by taking into consideration SMI types, consumption contexts, and message framing styles.
Despite increasing usage of spirituality and fantasy in advertising, especially during the novel coronovirus pandemic, the implications of this trend on consumer well-being and behavior remain unknown. To address this gap, this research conceptualizes a spiritual-fantasy advertising framework and its subsequent effects on consumer well-being and responses to advertising by synthesizing and integrating extant literature on spirituality and fantasy. In contrast to a common view that advertising decreases consumer well-being, we demonstrate how and why advertising evoking spirituality and fantasy can enhance consumers’ eudaimonic and hedonic well-being. Our research contributes to a more nuanced understanding of contemporary spirituality that includes fantasy, as well as advertising. We develop a rich research agenda for this important but underexplored area. The proposed comprehensive framework can guide advertising practice and research going forward, especially for those considering such topics as spirituality, fantasy, or consumer well-being.
An Introduction to Statistical Learning provides an accessible overview of the field of statistical learning, an essential toolset for making sense of the vast and complex data sets that have emerged in fields ranging from biology to finance to marketing to astrophysics in the past twenty years. This book presents some of the most important modeling and prediction techniques, along with relevant applications. Topics include linear regression, classification, resampling methods, shrinkage approaches, tree-based methods, support vector machines, clustering, deep learning, survival analysis, multiple testing, and more. Color graphics and real-world examples are used to illustrate the methods presented. Since the goal of this textbook is to facilitate the use of these statistical learning techniques by practitioners in science, industry, and other fields, each chapter contains a tutorial on implementing the analyses and methods presented in R, an extremely popular open source statistical software platform.
Two of the authors co-wrote The Elements of Statistical Learning (Hastie, Tibshirani and Friedman, 2nd edition 2009), a popular reference book for statistics and machine learning researchers. An Introduction to Statistical Learning covers many of the same topics, but at a level accessible to a much broader audience. This book is targeted at statisticians and non-statisticians alike who wish to use cutting-edge statistical learning techniques to analyze their data. The text assumes only a previous course in linear regression and no knowledge of matrix algebra.
This Second Edition features new chapters on deep learning, survival analysis, and multiple testing, as well as expanded treatments of naïve Bayes, generalized linear models, Bayesian additive regression trees, and matrix completion. R code has been updated throughout to ensure compatibility.
Social media contains a massive amount of information, which provides researchers and practitioners with an invaluable source of data to conduct research from end-users' perspectives, in order to influence firm strategic choices. Although an extensive amount of research has been developed in B2C and B2B marketing context, few social media studies take a dive into potential linkages between external and internal marketing contexts in an industry specific paradigm. This study aims to bridge B2C and B2B social media marketing, by adopting the outside-in perspective as theoretical lens. Using a large-scale dataset, collected from a micro-blogging site, and consumer-oriented information assembled from multiple sources, we empirically examine the inter-relationship between firm-generated messages, consumer digital engagement, and firm sales performance in the movie industry. Theoretically, this study builds upon the outside-in perspective and extends the current knowledge of the outside-in perspective to the social media context. It also bridges the B2C and B2B marketing literature by demonstrating that the insight garnered from B2C social media interactions should be integrated into the B2B firm interactions, communications, and decision makings. Managerially, this study provides movie practitioners with important implications.
At the intersection of technology and marketing, the authors develop a framework to unobtrusively detect salespersons’ faces and simultaneously extract six emotions: happiness, sadness, surprise, anger, fear, and disgust. They analyze 99,451 sales pitches on a livestream retailing platform and match them with actual sales transactions. Results reveal that each emotional display, including happiness, uniformly exhibits a negative U-shaped effect on sales over time. The maximum sales resistance appears in the middle rather than at the beginning or the end of sales pitches. Taken together, in one-to-many screen-mediated communications, salespersons should sell with a straight face. In addition, the authors derive closed-form formulae for the optimal allocation of the presence of a face and emotional displays over the presentation span. In contrast to the U-shaped effects, the optimal face presence wanes at the start, gradually builds to a crescendo, and eventually ebbs. Finally, they show how to objectively rank salespeople and circumvent biases in performance appraisals, thereby making novel contributions to people analytics. This research integrates new types of data and methods, key theoretical insights, and important managerial implications to inform the expanding opportunity that livestreaming presents to marketers to create, communicate, deliver, and capture value.
Advertising is oft described as the art of capitalism. This indispensable form of communication, in all its Technicolor glory, has the power to shape culture, conscience and commerce. Therein lies the (potential) rub. Advertising promotes consumption as the solution to all of life’s problems. Consumers appear to benefit when conveyed information reduces ignorance and lowers transaction costs for legitimate needs. However, consumers may also be adversely affected when the persuasive influence on consumer behavior extends to the production of previously undiscovered wants or desires. The resultant veil of consumerism enables individuals to overlook the inevitable hollowness that underlies the pursuit of wellbeing through material goods and services. Academic research reinforcing the efficacy of advertising and highlighting its cautionary contours abounds across multiple disciplines. This begs the question, ‘Does advertising, in fact, help or hinder consumer well-being (CWB)?’ The authors conduct a systematic review of the literature between the years 1980 (the emergence of CWB as a formal construct in the marketing literature) and 2020 to establish the extent to which extant research has progressed in response to this broad question. Grounded theory supports a series of emergent themes, as well as inconspicuous gaps that require attention to move the field forward. A framework is developed, and research agenda proposed, to guide future study.
YouTube-based ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) has become widely popular in South Korea as a readily accessible mode of self-care. However, ASMR scholarship in South Korea has largely overlooked a discussion of its engagement with gender norms. This essay fills the gap by analyzing South Korean male ASMRtists performing digital care through “boyfriend role plays” and “boy’s love (BL) role plays.” Probing into these examples from the perspective of digital gender, I argue that the ASMR’s haptic encounter has the potential to turn the ASMRtist, the audience, and the Internet itself into active performers rehearsing the possibility of subverting the offline society’s normative expectations of gender roles.
Automated content analysis of online travel reviews allows identification of topics of travelers' satisfaction, yet its domain is not well researched. We suggest that the Anna Karenina principle positing a greater variability of the factors leading to business failure as opposed to those leading to success can be applied to the domain of visitors’ reviews of historic and cultural attractions. The larger variability of issues in reviews of dissatisfied visitors is likely to result in limitations for automated topic modeling. We confirm our proposition using TripAdvisor reviews of the Terracotta Army museum in China, and validate the outcome with two additional sites. The study strongly suggests that application of unsupervised topic mining algorithms to negative reviews may be problematic and the results should be treated with caution. The main themes of dissatisfaction of visitors to all three sites are reported and practical implications for management of the attractions are discussed.
Advertising researchers and practitioners are increasingly using social media analytics (SMA), but focused overviews that explain how to use various SMA techniques are scarce. We focus on how researchers and practitioners can computationally analyze topics of conversation in social media posts, compare each to a human-coded topic analysis of a brand’s Twitter feed, and provide recommendations on how to assess and choose which computational methods to use. The computational methodologies that we survey in this article are text preprocessed summarization, phrase mining, topic modeling, supervised machine learning for text classification, and semantic topic tagging.
This research examines customer engagement in social media (CESM) using a meta-analytic model of 814 effect sizes across 97 studies involving 161,059 respondents. Findings reveal that customer engagement is driven by satisfaction, positive emotions, and trust, but not by commitment. Satisfaction is a stronger predictor of customer engagement in high (vs. low) convenience, B2B (vs. B2C), and Twitter (vs. Facebook and Blogs). Twitter appears twice as likely as other social media platforms to improve customer engagement via satisfaction and positive emotions. Customer engagement is also found to have substantial value for companies, directly impacting firm performance, behavioral intention, and word-of-mouth. Moreover, hedonic consumption yields nearly three times stronger customer engagement to firm performance effects vis-à-vis utilitarian consumption. However, contrary to conventional managerial wisdom, word-of-mouth does not improve firm performance nor does it mediate customer engagement effects on firm performance. Contributions to customer engagement theory, including an embellishment of the customer engagement mechanics definition, and practical implications for managers are discussed.
While the literature related to this topic has predominantly focused on investigating the influence mechanism that social media influencers (SMIs) impose over their followers, less is known about their attachment mechanism. Given that social media platforms were originally designed to facilitate personal bonding and not product or brand recommendations, we posited that social media followers' emotional attachment to SMIs is an important precedent that affects the followers' behavioral inclination to accept the SMIs' endorsements. We thus drew new attention to the relationship between SMIs and their followers by focusing on their attachment development mechanism and its casual factors and effects. In doing so, Study 1 inductively analyzed the key causal factors, both with respect to SMI persona- and content-driven attributes, that make followers feel attached to SMIs. By integrating the findings of Study 1 with the human brand theory, Study 2 provided empirical evidence after analyzing 325 U.S. consumers' responses about how SMIs' personas (i.e., inspiration, enjoyability, and similarity) and content curation abilities (i.e., informativeness) affected followers to perceive the SMIs as human brands who fulfill their needs for ideality, relatedness, and competence—all of which resulted in an intense attachment to SMIs. It was this positive emotion shaped with SMIs that transferred to SMIs’ endorsements and positively influenced the followers to acquire the products/brands that the SMIs recommended.
Recently, as the development of media contents accelerated, ASMR based on auditory, has been taking center stage in its field. In 2010, Jennifer Allen for the first time presented the definition that ‘ASMR is a specific sound that gives pleasure', and recently it is used as a coined word among young people. The triggers used in ASMR marketing draw a stronger commitment within the consumers, by accompanying visual stimuli consistent with auditory stimuli. Consumers can acquire prior knowledge of the brand while enjoying ASMR, and they can even have indirect experiences. The purposes of this study are: first, to analyze significant value of ASMR in auditory sense field in modern days; second, to identify the characteristics of ASMR marketing through commitment and nostalgia; third, to investigate the effect of ASMR marketing on consumers.
In an examination of influencer success, the current research draws from brand personality literature and identified social media influencers (SMIs) as human brands. Specifically, this research examines how an influencer’s perceived sincerity trait and consumer envy influences consumers’ evaluations toward the influencer as well as brand endorsements across different product types. Data indicate that participants report a more favorable attitude towards a high-sincerity SMI, and envy was a significant moderator that enhanced participants’ attitude towards a low-sincerity influencer. Additionally, whereas brand attitude did not differ by influencers’ sincerity levels for a symbolic product, the high-sincerity influencer was more effective in elucidating favorable brand attitude from participants when endorsing a utilitarian product. Implications of the findings are discussed with suggestions for future research.