Driven by the consumer demand for companies to be socially responsible, companies are increasingly relating their brands to causes and charities in order to accomplish nonprofit objectives and corporate sustainability. In a social marketing campaign, the consumers’ choice of the cause can influence their reactions through the processes of choice. Allowing the consumers to choose the cause may also reinforce their personal role in the donation process, which may result in a better outcome. Further, advertisers are paying increasing attention to the launch of social marketing campaigns via social media, since social media has recently become an essential part of daily life and therefore an imperative venue through which companies connect with consumers. Focusing on the rapidly evolving social media landscape, this study primarily clarifies (1) how choice influences consumers’ perceived interactivity with a social marketing campaign in the social media context, and (2) consumer involvement, as consumers’ individual differences can enhance or limit the effects of a social marketing campaign with choice. Using field experiments, this study investigates the relationships between the consumers’ choice, perceived interactivity, attitude, and purchase intention, and considers the moderating effects of involvement on those relationships. This study’s contributions are that it illuminates (1) the effects of choice on the perceived interactivity of social marketing campaigns in social media contexts, (2) the role of involvement in social marketing campaigns as a moderator, and (3) attitude and purchase intention as outcomes that can facilitate the construction of a theoretical model for social marketing campaigns with choice in the social media context and offer possible implications for advertising practitioners.

This study addresses the relationship between individual differences regarding self-concept, measured by Self Concept Clarity (SCC) scale and Relational-Interdependent Self-Construal and relationships (RISC) scale, and diverse affective consequences after choice behavior. We hypothesized that lower self-concept clarity and higher relational interdependence would be related to increased susceptibility to choice context–for example, how a choice set is constructed based on one’s initial preference. We examined how variations in a choice set can produce different affective consequences after making choices, and investigated the underlying neural mechanism using fMRI. In this experiment, participants first rated their preferences for art posters, and made a series of choices from a presented set. After the choice task, they completed post-choice measures including preferences for the chosen posters, as well as measures of their self-concept clarity and relational interdependence. Our behavioral results demonstrated that when participants faced more conflicting choice context, self-concept clarity was related to more positive affective consequences after choice, whereas relational interdependence was correlated with a lower second-rated attractiveness of the chosen option. The neuroimaging analysis of choice-making revealed that self-concept clarity and the degree of their relational interdependence served as modulators in shaping how one perceives and experiences the same decision-making process. These results have theoretical and practical importance in that it is one of the first studies investigating the influence of the individual differences regarding self-concept on value-based decision making process among diverse choice set contexts.