Engagement is a central aspect of discussions surrounding online brand communities. The current paper advances the existing thinking associated with conceptualisation of engagement in the context of online brand communities. By understanding how brands engage in an online community we can provide better community management and benefit a brand.

Some well-known luxury fashion brands log off social media or deliberately keep their accounts empty. The article investigates how consumers of high-end fashion brands react to this social media strategy through a series of experiments. This study provides managerial implications for social media strategy of luxury fashion brands.

We explore how young, educated consumers in a collectivist emerging market, utilize social media (SM) to increase self-esteem through interaction with retailers and achieve emotional well-being. Primary data were collected in Vietnam through a survey. 192 responses were analyzed using PLS-SEM. The findings show that SM provides an online space for value co-creation, where young consumers feel more closely connected with the service provider and express themselves to retailers. Close interaction via a retailer’s mediation “responsiveness” facilitates consumer learning and provides opportunities for consumers to convert initial knowledge to second stage knowledge through conversion. In the process of mediation and interaction, SM is used to facilitate the learning cycle. Also, retailers apply the value-in-use concept by adapting relevant information to better suit a particular individual’s needs. This imbues a sense of self confidence and results in consumers gaining self-esteem.

Influencers have become a critical component of marketing strategy to increase awareness, encourage consideration, and drive purchases. A new type of influencer, computer-generated and artificial intelligence-powered avatars, has emerged amid this boom. Despite the mixed marketing results virtual influencers deliver, they are generally thought to create similar engagement as human influencers. Consumers appear capable of developing complex psychological processes when engaging with virtual influencers. Even though the positive impact of influencers is evident, there is a growing concern about how they can affect consumers' well-being. The feeling of envy is a significant well-being concern in the social media world. Assuming virtual influencers can deliver similar emotional effects as human influencers, can we feel envy towards virtual influencers?

By using signaling theory, we shed light on how international entrepreneurial ventures co-brand with international players by leveraging multichannel approaches involving social media platforms. The contribution to signaling theory within international marketing literature is multi-fold.

The impact of firms' marketing communication on word of mouth (WOM) has been studied extensively in recent years, with a growing focus on electronic word of mouth (eWOM). The advent of the internet and the participatory web or Web 2.0 has dramatically changed the relationship between marketers and consumers, with consumers playing a more active role. However, there is a gap in understanding this area, including a lack of research on identifying specific groups of consumers that companies should focus on for eWOM marketing. Eye-tracking techniques have been suggested to address this issue, but these methods can be costly and rely on lab-based observations. Analyzing unstructured data from consumer-to-consumer interactions on social media is an underutilized approach in current marketing literature. The authenticity of eWOM is a highly valuable trait, but there can be a tension between commercial and communal norms, even in relatively informal settings like a blogger endorsing a product.

Social media has emerged as a prevalent tool for businesses in recent years through which brands actively engage in promotions. This development has resulted in several social media trends aimed at garnering increased consumer engagement on various social media platforms that brands utilize routinely. We investigate one such prevalent social media trend: brands sharing memes. Several popular brands, such as Netflix, regularly post memes on social media platforms. Therefore, it is important to study the brands’ use of memes and their resultant impact on consumer behavior.

There is a growing trend towards consumption of meat alternatives. In response to rising demand, many brands add meat alternative options to their offerings (e.g., Impossible Whopper from Burger King, McPlant from McDonald’s). Consistent with this trend, a growing literature explores how to encourage consumers to reduce meat consumption and increase acceptance of meat alternatives. However, there are two major limitations in literature. First, most studies in this area do not employ real behavioral outcomes as the focal dependent variable. As a result, we cannot be certain that such findings can be extrapolated into real-world settings. Second, the majority of studies have focused on cognitive factors in investigating acceptance of meat alternatives. Hence, there is a need to attend more to affective factors when investigating how we can advertise meat alternatives. Against this backdrop, the present research investigates the interactive effect between regulatory mode (a motivational factor) and positive emotion (an affective factor) for driving social media engagement in advertising meat alternatives. Regulatory mode theory posits that consumers engage in goal pursuit by adopting locomotion (a motivation to “just do it”) and assessment orientations (a motivation to “do the right thing”). We propose that different, discrete positive emotions could interact with regulatory mode to create “fit” effects. Specifically, the fit between assessment orientation and the emotion of awe, and between locomotion orientation and the emotion of love will lead to increased social media engagement.

This research presents a conceptual framework for a comprehensive understanding of the causes of user migration from social media networking sites. The results of our survey show that users’ intentions to switch social media platforms are influenced by user satisfaction, alternative attractiveness, peer influence, and perceived switching costs.

Despite a surging amount of research on value co-creation in the social media context, research on how value co-creation and value co-destruction coexist from a system perspective remains scarce. This conceptual research aims to understand how social media allows for value to be co-created and/or co-destroyed in interconnected social networks. The study takes a first step toward integrating the two value processes in the social media context and opens up new research possibilities. By looking at value co-creation, we differentiate between values that are created from both firm and customer sides and show the value can be destructed if without cautions. From a managerial standpoint, the proposed framework could facilitate managers to build a more holistic view of creating social media value through collaboration with their social media users.

This study answers an important question for university social media advertising. Does processing fluency of the brand and brand identity (e.g., name, logo, symbol etc.) of the university affect the behavior intention of target customers for the university? The results show that name processing fluency (especially pronunciation), advertising processing fluency, brand awareness, brand value, and brand ranking significantly impact behavior intention. In addition, target audience’s individual social media behavior (e.g., general attitude toward the social media, frequency of social media use and involvement) explains the attitude toward the university advertising in social media.

Social media influencers are becoming increasingly important to the advertising world. As individuals who use their extensive following to endorse products, create trends and ultimately drive purchase intentions, influencers are often seen as role models, especially as pertains to body image. As such, we conduct experimental research to examine how influencer size (0 vs. 14) affects attractiveness perceptions, perfectionist expectations, and purchase intentions. Drawing on self-determination theory we find that perfectionism toward others is the underlying mechanism for the effects of motivation and size. Societal and managerial implications are discussed.

오디오SNS는 기존의 SNS가 개방성을 추구하는 것과 달리, 제한적 속성을 주 된 특징으로 한다. 본 연구에서는 가치기반수용모델(VAM)을 기반으로 제한적 속성이 사용 자의 오디오SNS 수용에 있어서 어떠한 역할을 하는지 분석하고자 한다. 제한적 속성을 접근 제한성, 소통제한성, 콘텐츠제한성 변수로 정의해 각 변수가 VAM의 핵심 변수를 매개로 인 지된 가치와 사용의도에 미치는 영향을 분석한다. 총 207명의 오디오SNS 사용자 및 잠재 사 용자의 설문 응답을 토대로 분석한 결과에 따르면 3가지 제한성 변수가 인지된 편익 요소인 유용성과 유희성에 영향을 미치며 사용자의 수용의도에 긍정적인 영향을 미치는 것으로 분 석되었다. 본 연구는 가치기반수용모델에 기반한 모형과 새로운 형태의 SNS 성장을 위한 방 향성을 제시한다는 점에서 중요한 의의를 지닌다.