Young consumers’ social media activities are increasingly important for marketers and retailers. A key phenomenon of social media platforms is that groups of people who share similar interests create a virtual community. The psychological sense of community (PSoC) refers to individuals’ perception of voluntary engagement and sharing of their stories with others in various settings. Theoretically grounded in PSoC and adopting social identity theory as a research framework, this study investigates the interrelationships among social media–related variables (e.g., perceived interactivity and PSoC), brand-related variables (e.g., self–brand connection and brand commitment), and consumers’ attitude formation toward brands featured on an influencer social media page and their subsequent intention to purchase a product/service via multichannels operated by the brands (e.g., brick-and-mortar, e-commerce).

In today’s digital era, as people increasingly spend their time online, social media has become a trendsetter for society. Social media platforms are now the primary source of information for consu...

Over the past decade, persuasive games (advergaming) and advertising in games (in-game advertising [IGA]) have been two types of engaging technology for promoting brands. This study examines how research on advertising within digital gaming has developed and evolved. The authors compile bibliometric data using the Web of Science, create a citation-based knowledge map, and explore the current state of research on advertising in digital games. Specifically, we employ bibliographic coupling and co-citation analysis methods and visually illustrate bibliometric networks. We discuss the topical relations and themes of advergaming and IGA research and further provide a robust road map for future research.

Information privacy and disclosure have been prominent issues revolving around social media. We adopted communication privacy management theory, the persuasion knowledge model, and the technology acceptance model and conducted a survey with 526 subjects and examined their privacy management on Facebook and the conditions upon which their decision to reveal or withhold private information was contingent. The results showed that consumers set up different privacy boundaries for different types of personal information. Social identity information and daily life and entertainment information tended to be shared more freely, while personal contact information was mostly withheld. Knowledge of and concern regarding technology ubiquity and companies’ business strategies involving big data were the strongest predictors of privacy protection behavior and privacy settings on Facebook. Online trust and Facebook intensity also interacted and jointly predicted privacy concerns. This study brought to researchers’ attention how big data are being used by marketers to target consumers.

Video games have come a long way—from the early 1980s and console-based systems to online gaming and mobile applications. The vernacular has also changed, as industry and academic professionals hav...

ABSTRACTConsumers can take advocacy actions on social media websites that validate and amplify brand messages and brand meanings. But why do some consumers choose to become brand advocates in social media while others do not? We propose and test an exploratory framework for the likelihood of consumers' social media advocacy behaviors (SABs; e.g., “Liking” brand pages, share brand postings) using the context of luxury brands. We posit that brand-level, social-influence, and individual-difference variables will influence the likelihood of SABs. Further, the effects of these independent variables will be mediated by three motivating variables—consumer perceptions of self-enhancement benefit, community identification benefit, and utilitarian benefit from SABs—and one inhibiting variable, social-evaluative anxiety from SABs. A study with 413 nonstudent, female participants supported our framework.

ABSTRACTAdvertising's dual mediation hypothesis (DMH) is an important model predicting the relationships among antecedent variables and advertising outcomes. The results of the study reported here extend this theory to a mobile phone branded app. Structural equation modeling with data collected from 277 Millennial participants showed that the DMH was the best-fitting model for explaining attitude toward the app among four competing models. Furthermore, an extended DMH, with an “intention to continue using the app” construct, was found to offer a superior fit over four other extended models and a better model than the traditional DMH.

ABSTRACTPersonalized communication is believed to be an effective persuasion strategy. However, few studies have examined the underlying processes responsible for its effects. This study investigates the role of perceived personalization as a mediating process. Three personalization strategies are compared: raising expectation, identification, and contextualization. The results confirm that perceived personalization mediates the effects of personalized advertising on attention, cognitive responses, and attitude toward the message. The increased attention caused by perceived personalization stimulates both positive and negative thoughts about the message. The findings imply that personalized advertisements have stronger effects when receivers are aware of the personalization elements.

This research documents how marketers across a variety of product categories use spokes-characters to communicate with consumers. Tweets were content analyzed for 20 spokes-characters representing a variety of brands and product categories. A random sample of 2,691 tweets was analyzed for content as was the tweet's day of the week, time of day, and month tweeted. The most frequently tweeted content type is pass-along, with news being the least frequently observed category. Significant differences are observed based on the spokes-character's gender, appearance, and product type represented. Female characters are significantly more likely to tweet original content, while male characters are significantly more likely to respond to queries. These male and female response patterns reflect gender stereotypes. Most spokes-characters tweet during weekday mornings. Tweet frequency peaks in the summer and declines during October, November, and December.

A viral advertising message on social networking sites (SNSs) has two sources: a brand that creates the message and an SNS user who passes along this message within his or her personal network. This study examined the influence of relationships with these two sources on receivers' intention to forward the viral advertising message. A significant interaction effect shows that having a strong consumer–brand relationship increases the receiver's intention to forward the viral advertising message sent by an online acquaintance, suggesting that a strong relationship with the brand can increase the effectiveness of electronic word of mouth on SNSs.