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Conceptual and empirical research over the past 20 years has moved the social media (SM) literature beyond the embryotic stage to a well-developed academic discipline. As the lead article in the special issue in the Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing on Cutting-Edge Research in Social Media and Interactive Marketing, this review and agenda article has two key goals: (1) to review key SM and interactive marketing research over the past three years and (2) to identify the next wave of high priority challenges and research opportunities.

Given the “cutting-edge” research focus of the special issue, this review and research agenda paper focused on articles published in 25 key marketing journals between January 2021 and March 2024. Initially, the search request was for articles with “social media, social selling, social commerce” located in the article title, author-selected key words and journal-selected keywords. Later, we conducted searches based on terminology from articles presented in the final review. In total, over 1,000 articles were reviewed across the 25 journals, plus additional ones that were cited in those journals that were not on the initial list.

Our review uncovered eight key content areas: (1) data sources, methodology and scale development; (2) emergent SM technologies; (3) artificial intelligence; (4) virtual reality; (5) sales and sales management; (6) consumer welfare; (7) influencer marketing; and (8) social commerce. Table I provides a summer of key articles and research findings for each of the content areas.

As a literature review and research agenda article, this paper is one of the most extensive to date on SM marketing, and particularly with regard to emergent research over the past three years. Recommendations for future research are integrated through the paper and summarized in Figure 2.

Consumer welfare is one of the eight emergent content areas uncovered in the literature review. Specific focus is on SM privacy, misinformation, mental health and misbehavior.

The current work aims to present a review of academic literature that systematizes the body of knowledge related to marketing and consumer behavior in order to identify the most effective variables that encourage the consumer towards a proper and better lifestyle, accordingly the paradigm of management, marketing and technology efforts to promote a “better” society preventing obesity.

A literature review was carried out to examine the studies of marketing and consumer behavior published in international peer-reviewed journals over the last twenty-three years (2000–2023). Our review finally considered a total amount of 46 articles.

Findings elucidate three overarching themes and associated sub-hemes, encompassing: (1) Product design for obesity prevention, including aspects such as labeling, nomenclature, packaging and assortment; (2) Technology-supported preventive measures, involving mobile applications, self-monitoring, short message services and digital therapeutics; and (3) Marketing and communication strategies, incorporating social advertising, nudge, social influence and initiatives targeting childhood obesity prevention. Furthermore, a comprehensive research agenda is presented, delineating potential avenues for future investigations predicated on the utility of the results in fostering subsequent endeavors within the realms of: efficacy and effectiveness studies; personalization and tailoring; behavioral change techniques and gamification; user experience and acceptance; cost-effectiveness and implementation; as well as ethical and privacy concerns.

Main limitations are related to the characteristics of the analyzed literature, resulting in only English journal articles, book chapter and so on. Thus, other relevant contributions in different languages discussing interesting insights might have been neglected.

This study offers several insights to managers, marketers and policymakers involved in the issue of the obesity prevention. Since obesity represents a crucial challenge for public health at a global level, with its incidence reaching epidemic proportions in recent decades, the results may be extremely useful and powerful because suggesting – by employing a robust resulting corpus of knowledge on this domain – several practical features, actions and tactics to face such an important challenge. Moreover, this paper offers for scholar and researcher a systematized knowledge around the issues of obesity prevention, together with a detailed research agenda emerging by the critical analysis of the emerging insights, and to practitioners systematized useful insights to project and develop their future business strategies.

By providing several actions and tactics for obesity prevention (e.g. as for product labeling, naming, packaging, assortment; the exploitation of new technologies for mobile applications design, self-monitoring, short message service (SMS) alert systems, digital therapeutics; the role of social advertising, nudge, social influence) this work perfectly match the emerging societal orientation related to business, marketing and technology efforts to create a “better” society.

The study shed lights the need for a holistic approach to obesity prevention, involving interaction between individual main topics. Importantly this is the first study to analyze the issue of obesity prevention by considering a multidisciplinary corpus of literature, analyzed trough an individual-centric orientation.

Endorsement marketing has been widely used to generate consumer attention, interest and purchase decisions among targeted audiences. Internet celebrities who become famous on the Internet are dependent on strategic intimacy to appeal to their followers. Our study aims to examine how multiple exposures to Internet celebrity endorsements influence consumers’ click and purchase decisions in the context of influencer marketing.

Based on a unique and representative dataset, the authors first model consumers’ choices for clicks and purchases with two panel fixed-effect logit models linking clicks and purchases with the frequency of exposure to Internet celebrity endorsement. To further control the endogeneity produced by the intercorrelation between the click and purchase models, the authors also adopt the two-stage Heckman probit structure to jointly estimate the two models using Maximum Likelihood Estimation. Robustness checks confirm the effectiveness of the models.

The results suggest that Internet celebrity endorsement plays a significant role in bringing referral traffic to e-commerce sites but is less helpful in affecting conversion to sales. The impact of repetitive Internet celebrity endorsements on consumers’ click decisions is U-shaped, but the role of Internet celebrities as online retailers will “shape-flip” this relationship to a negative linear relation.

Our study is the first to investigate the repetitive exposure effect of Internet celebrity endorsement. The results show a contradictory pattern with a wear-out effect of repetition in the advertising literature. This is the first study to show how the endorsing self, which is a common business model in influencer marketing, moderates the effectiveness of influencer marketing.

The growth of social media globally has led to brands adopting memes as a tool for communication. They have influenced digital culture, politics and marketing. This study aims to highlight the research gap in meme literature by profiling and science mapping.

This study has performed a bibliometric analysis of research papers on memes from the Scopus database. The authors profiled the literature and found the most relevant journal, author and document. Science mapping techniques such as thematic analysis, thematic evolution and co-citation of papers with content analysis were used.

Profiling of literature revealed that the most relevant journal, based on a number of papers and citations, is New Media and Society. The top researcher on memes is Shiffman L (seven papers), and the most cited author is Menczer F (717 citations). The paper titled “Towards A Unified Science of Cultural Evolution” has the highest number of citations (402). Thematic mapping revealed “Social Movements” and “Twitter” are the currently trending themes. The co-citation analysis clustered the literature into two. The first cluster elucidates the theoretical underpinnings of memes, while the second cluster explicates the various contexts in which memes are studied.

This study will be vital to researchers hoping to study internet memes by providing directions for future research. Furthermore, the insights from this study will enable social media managers to use memes effectively.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study seems to be the first to use bibliometric analysis to profile and map meme literature. This study provides a new perspective for meme researchers to explore memes and suggests marketers implement novel meme-based strategies in their marketing communications.

As brands progressively become instruments for consumers to advocate for social change, many feel pressure to engage in social purpose branding (SPB) through addressing social issues. In a rush to remain socially relevant, brands have approached SPB differently; some genuinely intend to advance the social issue, while some intend to capitalise on social movements to mobilise the brand. This paper aims to explain these differences by theoretically outlining various approaches to SPB.

This mixed method paper draws on theory, interviews with marketing practitioners, and practical exemplars to present a typology of SPB approaches. 

Using institutional logics theory, SPB is categorised into four approaches: social purpose-driving, social purpose-driven, social purpose-aligning and social purpose-washing.

The typological framework for SPB advances this domain to outline effective and ineffective ways for brands to engage with social issues. A detailed agenda for further research is provided to guide ongoing SPB research. 

The typology presented reduces complexity and helps marketers understand the different approaches to engaging with a social issue. Given the growing intertwinement of brands and social issues, this research is essential for brands seeking to advance a social issue and remain relevant.

This paper offers a novel conceptualisation of SPB by defining it, identifying a framework of its characteristics, and detailing four SPB approaches. 

Involvement plays a crucial role in understanding consumer behavior. In recent years, the concept of social innovation has gained momentum, resulting in the development of eco-friendly products and initiatives to tackle societal issues. This trend is driven by consumers, who are increasingly aware of the social benefits of the products they buy. The present study aims to investigate how socially innovative, environmentally conscious consumers can influence their engagement with eco-friendly products.

Researchers aimed to investigate the “impact of social innovation on involvement in environmentally friendly products.” They selected active members of various environmental organizations operating in the country to conduct the study. Convenience sampling was used to reach out to these members, and the managers of these organizations sent an electronic questionnaire to all members' email addresses.

The study found that socially innovative, environmentally conscious consumers tend to be more interested in the symbolic meaning and pleasure of products, leading to a decrease in perceived risk and risk importance.

There are limited studies examining the relationship between social innovation and product innovation. Therefore, the novelty of this research lies in its exploration of the relationship between these two concepts. Unlike previous studies, this research found a negative relationship between the dimensions of risk importance and risk probability. This result was interpreted as environmentally friendly products being sensitive to public welfare and not being perceived as risky by environmentalists.

This study explores whether and how four main factors of short-branded video content (content matching, information relevance, storytelling and emotionality) facilitate consumer engagement (likes, comments and shares), as well as the moderating effect of the release time (morning, afternoon and evening) in such relationships.

This study uses Python to write programs to crawl relevant data information, such as consumer engagement and short video release time. It combines coding methods to empirically analyze the impact of short-branded video content characteristics on consumer engagement. A total of 10,240 Weibo short videos (total duration: 238.645 h) from 122 well-known brands are utilized as research objects.

Empirical results show that the content characteristics of short videos significantly affected consumer engagement. Furthermore, the release time of videos significantly moderated the relationship between the emotionality of short videos and consumer engagement. Content released in the morning enhanced the positive impact of warmth, excitement and joy on consumer engagement, compared to that released in the afternoon.

The findings provide new insights for the dissemination of products and brand culture through short videos. The authors suggest that enterprises that use brand videos consider content matching, information relevance, storytelling and emotionality in their design.

From a broader perspective, this study constructs a new method for comprehensively evaluating short-branded video content, based on four dimensions (content matching, information relevance, storytelling and emotionality) and explores the value of these dimensions for creating social media marketing success, such as via consumer engagement.

This study attempts to encapsulate the idea of influencer marketing in the food sector and the vital role played by food influencers in shaping the dietary preferences, tastes and decisions of their social media followers and turning them into brand advocates.

An online survey of 383 social media users, utilizing a self-administered questionnaire, was undertaken to validate the proposed research design. The partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) methodology was used to analyze the data and test the relationships between the constructs.

The results confirm the validity and reliability of the research model. The research revealed the positive influence of influencer–follower demographics and attitude congruence on followers’ food choices, which in turn leads to followers’ delight and significantly impacts their brand advocacy. It also depicts how followers’ perceived trust in an influencer mediates the relationship between their similarity with the influencers, their food choices and brand advocacy.

The study proposes a new theoretical framework and empirically tests the effectiveness of influencer marketing in influencing social media users’ food choice behavior and brand advocacy through the medium of followers’ congruence with social media influencers. The findings offer noteworthy theoretical and managerial implications for academicians as well as marketing practitioners.

Virtual influencers (VIs), who are fictional characters, have gained popularity in recent years, particularly among Generation Z and millennials. With the hype surrounding VIs, more research is required. Thus, this study aims to examine how Gen Z members and millennials react to VIs used for marketing purposes.

This study follows an exploratory approach. The data were collected from 29 participants (14 male and 15 female) through two focus groups and semi-structured interviews.

The authors found that opinions about VIs were mixed, and two main themes emerged from the study: (1) challenges and potential and (2) decision-making and psychological aspects.

This study broadens the paradigm for analysing the efficacy of VIs. This emerging topic is of relevance for the marketing sector as well as for transdisciplinary research and practice.

Introduction: In today’s world of increasing competition, diminishing product differentiation, higher customer expectations, easy product replacements and lowering brand loyalty, organisations are evolving new marketing strategies for economic, societal and sustainability. Cause-related marketing (hereafter referred to as CRM), a strategic sustainable philanthropic practice, is the upcoming form of CSR. CRM plays an instrumental role in achieving self-brand connection and brand loyalty.

Purpose: To explore, integrate and interconnect concepts of CRM and self-brand connection to get more insights into the imperative role of CRM strategy in developing self-brand connections that can lead to brand loyalty in the most sustainable way. For this, CRM and self-brand connection, as proposed by societal marketing and branding literature, were explored. This chapter is a propositional inventory where the researcher has explored the antecedents of CRM strategy and its role in developing brand loyalty through self-brand connection.

Methodology: This chapter is centred upon the existing literature on sustainability, CRM and branding to understand better the relationships between dimensions and consequences of CRM and its interlinkage with brand loyalty.

Findings: The literature recommends that selected dimensions: Cause-brand fit, product type, altruistic motivation and brand credibility determine the effectiveness of CRM strategy. It also establishes the profound impact of attitude towards brand, brand perception and brand distinctiveness on self-brand connection. A theoretical framework based on the existing literature represents an amalgamated groundwork for developing effective, sustainable CRM strategies in conjunction with the self-brand connection. The proposed framework is distinct as no study conjoins the abovementioned concepts and aims to comprehend whether this integration is brand loyalty.