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Although previous research emphasized the importance of inspiration in influencing consumer behavior, there is no categorical response to how social-media inspirational content inspires consumers across cultures. This paper aims to take on this agenda through a vignette experimental study.

This paper devised a vignette study involving subjects (n = 370) recruited from Nigeria and South Africa. The structural equation modeling procedure, analysis of variance (ANOVA) and regression analysis aided the examination of the scale psychometrics and hypotheses testing.

Among other findings, this study shows that: inspirational content (utilitarian vs hedonic) exerts a positive differential effect on customer inspiration (CI) such that the effect of hedonic content is more pronounced than utilitarian content; collectivistic consumers are inspired more than individualists; CI triggers customer engagement behaviors (CEBs) and purchase intention, and an inspired-to component of CI mediates the effect of inspired-by on CEBs and purchase intention.

While this study makes significant contributions to knowledge on CI, the focus on firm-generated content limits the scope of this study. Future research should examine the effect of consumer-generated content on CI. Additionally, the likely contextual influence of product type on CI and its triggers in the context of the foote, cone and belding grid creates the room to further interrogate the research model under conditions of high/low involvement products.

By showing how social-media inspirational content and cultural orientation separately influence and interact to influence CI which consequently triggers CEBs and purchase intention, the findings highlight the psychological mechanisms through which CEBs and purchase intention can be simultaneously triggered.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of social content marketing in social media on the effectiveness of the new product development process of high-tech companies with regard to the e-trust as a mediator between content and effectiveness.

For this study, a descriptive research method has been adopted. Data were collected through a questionnaire. In total, 430 questionnaires were distributed among professionals and managers working in R&D, marketing, sales and strategic departments of firms affiliated with ICT Guild Organization in September 2017. Of this number, 384 complete questionnaires were included in the study. Data were analyzed using structural equation method by Smart PLS software.

Findings show that although social content marketing and e-trust influenced the effectiveness of the product development process, e-trust did not play a mediating role in the relationship between social content marketing and effectiveness of product development process in high-tech companies.

High-tech companies, drawing on the results of this research, can utilize the component of social content marketing in social and mobile media and content publication through e-commerce, social and mobile media and m-commerce while analyzing user-generated content to identify user demands and achieve the proper idea generation. At the time of commercializing, by educating and informing customers, they mitigate fears and risks. This will lead to increasing the effectiveness of the product development process, market share and achieving revenue goals.

This study investigates the social content marketing role in product development process in high-tech companies and tests the model in the context of the Tehran IT industries. The result of this study provides a reference for managers of high-tech companies and helps them lower the failure rate of product development.

This study aims to test the role of branded content marketing on YouTube in brand building and explicates the mechanism through which brand content influences brand loyalty and purchase intentions.

This study uses a quantitative, Web-based, three-step randomized intervention design and recruits YouTube users through the Amazon Mechanical Turk (n = 925).

Post-intervention results (n = 596) show that consumers’ repeated exposure to branded content facilitates their social learning processes. Consumers derive value from the relevant content and subsequently form more favorable brand attitudes, greater brand loyalty and heightened purchase intentions. Brand loyalty mediates the effect of perceived brand content value on purchase intentions.

This study’s findings support the advantages of investing in the creation and dissemination of valuable brand content through a brand’s own social media channel(s). While informative content and entertaining content can both drive brand loyalty, high product-involvement brands are advised to emphasize on informative content to precipitate brand–consumer attachment. Low product-involvement brands, on the other hand, are advised to feature more enticing and captivating content to stimulate consumer devotion.

This study reveals the positive impact of branded content marketing within social media on consumers’ brand attitudes, brand loyalty and purchase intentions. It also explicates the mechanism through which content marketing influences brand evaluation and purchase intentions by coordinating consumer learning and value derivation.

Today, viral marketing is popular as a highly effective marketing strategy with a low cost for mass targeting. This is suitable for the Universal Health Coverage campaign which seeks to attract the whole nation’s population to voluntarily register with social health insurance. It uses the target market itself as a weapon and the marketing content as a bullet. This study aims to determine the exact viral marketing content for the Universal Health Coverage campaign in Indonesia.

Viral marketing content is formulated based on the feelings of the target market toward social health insurance. Qualitative content analysis was conducted to identify the media framing and the audience’s response. Two of the biggest online news websites were analysed to determine the media framing. The audience’s response was identified through a Facebook group discussion.

This study shows that negative media framing makes people question the benefit of participating in social health insurance. Considering the local wisdom of Indonesia, helping poor people through social health insurance would be the best viral marketing content.

Because of the limited number of sources focused on the audience’s responses that have been analysed, the variations in the audience response could not be captured completely. Researchers should also analyse other audience channels (social media and messenger application) besides Facebook.

The paper includes implications for the future marketing agenda of insurance providers in relation to engaging the community.

This study operationally introduced how to use the media channel selected and audience framing in designing an effective viral marketing content in health-care marketing.

This paper aims to uncover the drivers of consumer-brand engagement on Facebook, understood here as users’ behavioral responses in the form of clicks, likes, shares and comments. We highlight which content components, interactivity cues (calls to action [CTA]) and media richness (e.g. video, photo and text) are most effective at inducing consumers to exhibit clicking, liking, commenting and sharing behaviors toward branded content.

This study analyzes 757 Facebook-based brand posts from a media and entertainment brand over a 15-week period. It investigates the relationship between interactive cues and media richness with consumer engagement using a negative binomial model.

Results show positive relationships for both interactivity cues and media richness content components on increasing consumer-brand engagement outcomes. The findings add clarity to previous inconsistent findings in the marketing literature. CTAs enhance all four engagement behaviors. Media richness also strongly influences all engagement behaviors, with visual imagery (photos and videos) attracting the most consumer responses.

The sampled posts pertain to one brand (a radio station) and are thus concentrated within the media/entertainment industry, which limits the generalizability of findings. In addition, the authors limit their focus to Facebook but recognize that findings may differ across more visual or textual social networking sites.

The authors uncover the most effective pairings of media richness and interactivity components to trigger marketer-desired, behavioral responses. For sharing, for example, the authors show that photo-based posts are more effective on average than video-based posts. The authors also show that including an interactive call to act to encourage one type of engagement behavior has a near-universal effect in increasing all engagement behaviors.

This study takes two widely used concepts within the communications and advertising literatures – interactivity cues and media richness – and tests their relationship with engagement using real and actual users’ data available via Facebook Insights. This method is more robust than surveys or wall scrapping, as it mitigates Facebook’s algorithm effect. The results produce more consistent relationships than previous content marketing studies to date.

This paper studies the relationships among consumers’ perceptions of brand personality, consumers’ brand attitudes and brand-owned social media content marketing (SMCM). The moderating effect of the brand content relevancy was also assessed.

A conceptual model was established and examined using two experiments with a total of 363 participants. Hierarchical regression analysis and an analysis of variance were performed to test seven research hypotheses.

Results show that the three forms of brand-owned SMCM, namely: conversation, storytelling and customer interaction and participation, are positively correlated with consumers’ brand personality perceptions and brand attitudes. Also, consumers’ perceptions of brand personality can partially mediate the relationship between brand-owned content marketing and consumers’ brand attitudes. Furthermore, the brand content relevancy does not show a moderating effect on the relationship between content marketing and consumers’ brand personality perceptions or brand attitudes.

First, a framework was established to delineate those paths by which owned social media content marketing (OSMCM) influences consumers’ attitudes towards a brand. Second, the study demonstrates the importance of conversation as a powerful method of OSMCM. Third, with respect to content in marketing strategies, firms do not need to confine themselves to a narrow scope of content or information that is closely related to the brands alone.

Social media influencers have become constant companions of a large audience of young consumers, but a crucial yet underexplored area of examination relates to the implications of exposure to influencers for an individual’s self-concept. This study aims to examine if and how individuals experience self-discrepancies when exposed to influencers and the impact of such discrepancies on their affect, cognition and behaviors toward the influencers and the brands they endorse.

The authors thematically analyze 17 semistructured interviews, develop a conceptual model and present a set of hypotheses. The hypotheses are tested by analyzing survey data from 503 respondents using structural equation modeling.

Individuals actively engage in comparisons with influencers’ virtual self-presentation and treat them as emblematic of an ideal self. The associated self-discrepancy can lead to both negative and positive affect, but while the latter has a positive impact on e-word of mouth (WOM) and purchase intent, the former has a negative impact. Perceived homophily dampens the impact of exposure to influencer content on discrepancy and strengthens the link between discrepancy and positive affect. Self-acceptance and mindfulness positively moderate the impact of discrepancy on positive affect and negatively on negative affect. Perceived authenticity strengthens the impact of positive affect on e-WOM and dampens the impact of negative affect on purchase intention.

The authors contribute to the literature on self-discrepancies by identifying a consumer context where, in addition to the theoretically predicted negative affect, an individual may experience more positive emotions like feeling motivated or inspired because of the perceived attainability of an influencer as an ideal self. The authors contribute to the influencer marketing literature by examining the influencer–follower relationship and its implications for an individual’s self-concept, including the role played by perceived homophily and authenticity. The authors also contribute to the literature on consumer well-being and identify the role of self-acceptance and mindfulness in shaping consumer experiences.

The authors provide a nuanced analysis of the impact of influencer marketing on consumer behavior with a focus on its impact on an individual’s self-concept. The authors argue for the role of perceived homophily and authenticity in shaping favorable consumer behavior outcomes and offer evidence for more inclusive approaches to marketing.

The authors identify the influencer–follower relationship as a unique social exchange where the source of self-discrepancy is also a homophilic solution provider for achieving one’s ideal self and report both positive and negative effects as outcomes of experiencing a self-discrepancy induced by a target perceived as more attainable. The authors situate understandings of perceived homophily and authenticity along these relationships and identify self-acceptance and mindfulness as mechanisms used by individuals to deal with discrepancies.

This study analyzes the effect of content marketing on women's happiness through eudaimonia and hedonism factors and the final result on desires and actions taken.

A total of 227 valid questionnaires were collected from women respondents. The data analysis used partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to clarify the relationships in the proposed model.

Content marketing turns out to be a crucial factor affecting both eudaimonia and hedonism. Moreover, while eudaimonia plays a particular role in women's behavior, hedonism works likewise on desires.

A crucial decision before developing content marketing is to consider if the final result is to produce desirability or feasibility in consumers. Content marketing addressing eudaimonia will impact feasibility; while the content aims to create desirability, the hedonic aspect of happiness should be emphasized.

Though content marketing and the effect of content marketing on brands' performance and consumer decision processes has been deeply analyzed in the literature, there is a lack of research into the effect of such content on consumers' well-being. Another contribution of this study is the focus on local brands and on women's eudaimonia and hedonism.

Despite the increasing popularity of influencer marketing, there exists a lack of understanding of how content created by social media influencers stimulates the pre-purchase behaviour of followers. Based on the stimulus-organism-response framework, this paper aims to address this lacuna by examining how influencer-created content affects the willingness of followers to search for more information related to the posted product.

A cross-sectional research design uses a web-based questionnaire among Instagram users in Sri Lanka. Structural equation modelling with analysis of moment structures 27 and SPSS PROCESS macro are used for hypothesis testing.

Findings indicate that the commercial orientation of influencer-created content reduces follower trustworthiness towards them and the perceived credibility of the content. Mediation results demonstrate that the commercial orientation of influencer-created content negatively affects follower willingness to search for more information related to the posted product through trustworthiness and perceived credibility.

When adopting influencer marketing to stimulate information search behaviour, marketing practitioners should carefully examine the commercial orientation of the content of the messages posted by social media influencers to maintain high levels of follower trustworthiness towards the influencer and positive follower credibility perceptions of the message.

This paper adds to influencer marketing literature by demonstrating the underlying process through which the commercial orientation of influencer-created content impacts follower willingness to search for product-related information.