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This study aims to examine current practices of social media marketing among major global brands across five product categories (namely, convenience, shopping, specialty, industrial and service). Assessing the frequency, media type and content orientations of corporate Facebook pages, this study aims to isolate the qualitative factors of a brand’s social media message that are most likely to facilitate a consumer response.

A content analysis of 1,086 social media posts was conducted from the corporate Facebook pages of 92 global brands during a one-month (snapshot) time horizon in July 2013. The data collected from each individual post include its media type (i.e. text, photo or video), its content orientation (i.e. task, interaction and self-oriented) and the number and type of consumer response it generated (i.e. likes, comments and shares).

Research findings reveal that global brands actively utilize social media, posting on average three messages per week and generally use photos (as a media type) and interaction-focused content (as a content orientation) to secure consumer responses. However, differences in consumer responses exist along various product categories, message media type and message content orientation.

Findings imply that marketers should not only carefully consider the media type they use to message consumers on social media but should also try to consider the individual consumer’s motive for interaction.

This article suggests a new way to study social media content by applying pre-existing communication frameworks from salesmanship literature as a way to define message content orientation.

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.

This study aims to understand the impact of content orientation, media type, and information richness on fan engagement in multi-sport global events.

The authors conducted a content analysis on Twitter posts recording over two million user impressions from the official account managed by the International Olympic Committee for India during the Tokyo Olympic Games 2020. A multivariate Poisson model using the Bayesian approach was used for analyzing data.

This study found that fan engagement is likely to be higher for player-oriented content as opposed to team-oriented content. Also, the usage of photos to enhance engagement worked better than any other media type. Finally, the results revealed that the inclusion of hashtags has a positive effect on fan engagement for tweet comments but not for like count and retweet count.

The study highlights the differences in player versus team-oriented posts in global multi-sport competitions. The findings have significant implications for practicing sport managers by informing them about key elements that drive fans to engage in online communication.

This study aims to categorize user-generated content (UGC) based on the target audience, namely, brand-oriented content (BOC) and community-oriented content (COC). By using the equity theory, this study investigated how personal factors (motivations and self-construal) and brand/product factors (brand luxury) drive members to generate brand-oriented or COC.

Experimental studies were conducted with online brand community (OBC) participants who had been active in an OBC in the past 30 days.

Both in Studies 1 and 3, participants with an independent self-construal generated more BOC relative to COC, whereas participants with an interdependent self-construal generated more COC relative to BOC. In Study 1, extrinsically motivated participants generated more BOC relative to COC, whereas intrinsically motivated participants generated more COC relative to BOC. However, this finding was not confirmed in Study 3. In Study 2, the participants of luxury brand communities generated more COC relative to BOC, whereas participants of affordable brand communities generated more BOC relative to COC. However, this finding was not confirmed in Study 3.

This research provides marketing practitioners with an opportunity to focus on different motivation types in different contexts. The study also helps marketing departments understand the relationship between brand characteristics and UGC types. Finally, the insights of this study can also be useful in a brand extension context.

This study has constructed a better understanding of content generation in OBCs by categorizing UGC based on their target audience.

Despite decades of scientific and practical experience in the field of integrated marketing communication (IMC), little is known about the role of IMC in the era of new media. The purpose of the present paper is to undertake a first step to close this gap by proposing thought-provoking impulses for customer-centric IMC. This is done by discussing central premises of customer-centric IMC in terms of the changed conditions on the media markets, its challenges and principles and its implementation issues.

The paper provides a conceptual approach to customer-centric IMC by deriving new lines of thinking from a review of existing literature relating to the concept of IMC.

The paper positions customer-centric IMC as an important advancement of IMC. It shows that the most important new lines of thinking which could be adopted as strategic components of customer-centric IMC are relationship orientation, content orientation and process orientation. The paper thus suggests that customer-centric IMC is a balancing act between a company’s own branding activities and the integration of customer-centered issues.

The originality of this paper resides in a detailed conceptual discussion of new insights into a customer-centric IMC. In contrast to existing work on IMC, this paper threads together the existing perspectives on IMC (inside-out and outside-in) to highlight the potential role of IMC in the era of social media (customer-centric IMC) by adding an outside-out view to the concept of IMC.

The purpose of this paper is to quantify how mobile app usage relates to the unique characteristics of behavioral orientations and content types, focussing on the interrelationship among content usage in the context of in-app purchase.

Using a large-scale data set of individual content usage in a particular music mobile app, the author builds a simultaneous equation panel data model to examine dynamic interdependent usage of mobile app.

The paper finds a positive temporal effect of self-oriented content usage (download) on other-oriented content usage (gift), based on behavioral orientation, and also a temporal interdependence between external (ringtone) and internal usage (mp3) based on types of content. The paper also finds that the fourth generation communications standard increases content usage in this mobile app.

These findings provide useful insights for mobile app developers, mobile network operators, content providers, and mobile device manufacturers.

This paper is one of the first to consider and empirically test the interrelationship between various kinds of content usage in music apps.

In continuation of Soylemez (2021), this study utilized equity theory and investigated how personal factors (personality traits) and community factors (ownership) influence relative generation of brand-oriented and community-oriented content.

A study of A/B testing was conducted with 104 online brand community (OBC) participants who had been active in an OBC in the last 30 days.

Members with a high level of conscientiousness, extroversion and neuroticism generate more brand-oriented content than community-oriented content. Openness to experience, agreeableness and community ownership have been found to have no significant effects.

This research helps marketing practitioners on whether they should build their own online brand communities. The study also suggests that brands should adjust their community strategies based on the personality traits of community members and expectations from the community.

This is the first study that investigates how personality traits and community ownership influence the generation of different types of user-generated content (UGC).

This paper expands theory on strategists by investigating how non-executive strategy professionals in multi-business firms strategize. In focus is the strategizing of two groups of non-executive strategy professionals: a corporate strategy team and eleven business strategists employed in each of the incorporated units.

A case study design was employed to explore privileged accessed data to gain first-hand in-depth qualities of strategists' work. The design was characterized by phenomenon driven immersed participatory insider research with retrospective reflection and theorizing. Data includes strategies, interview data, calendars, meeting minutes, workshop material and observational field notes.

Non-executive strategy professionals in multi-business firms are either employed at the corporate center or in the peripheral businesses. Based on this location and their individual experiences they assume an exclusive content or an inclusive process strategizing orientation. In practice, the groups strategize tightly together.

Case studies are useful in explorative research providing thick descriptions. While empirically rich, the results of this study are limited by the context of one single case. Future research is encouraged to confirm, contradict and refine the results presented.

The insights from this study can help organizations regarding how to employ strategy professionals in multi-business firms.

This paper contributes to a recognized need to explore strategists' work. In contrary to the majority of existing research, focusing on senior management and/or strategy formulation, this paper highlighted non-executive strategy professionals' strategizing.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the link between the globalization/adaptation debate and corporate foundation activity within a small subset of such foundations. In the light of this debate, the study analyzes the corporate social responsibility (CSR) approaches of this sample of corporate-owned foundations using the tri-dimensional CSR research model of Arthaud-Day (2005) to articulate the perspective, content and strategic orientations of the companies.

The study selects three different corporate foundations based on internationalization scale and field of activities. A content analysis methodology is applied to the data collected from the official web sites of 24 corporate foundations.

The analysis results show a general compatibility between the subsidiaries and the main branches of the corporate foundations, at least on the conceptual level. However, the practices of CSR activities, targeted stakeholders or content domains differ at the operational level. Nevertheless, local governance is still not totally independent, especially in terms of received funds. Therefore, this study concludes that the internationalization strategies of these corporate foundations are still at a formative stage of transnationalization.

The study explores the three selected international companies and their corporate foundations. Future studies may extend the number of selected industries and companies. Together with increased coverage, future survey studies may help explain the global or local orientations of corporate foundations’ CSR in different domains.

Corporate foundations may extend their transnational strategies to further stages by differentiating between those units that should be managed on a global scale and those that should be managed by local authorities. They may balance the amount of investment in different regions while adopting collaborative governance models to respond to regions where grant applications are not an easy tool for stakeholders to use.

Given the relatively paucity of CSR studies with an international focus, this study contributes to the standardization or localization debate in the international business literature. The study’s originality lies in its attempt to operationalize the theoretical research model and through its use of corporate foundations as the unit of analysis.

This study aims to examine the actions of corporate social responsibility (CSR) at a national business context that is firmly defined by prolonged financial crisis. It does so by using a critical view on CSR disclosures in an attempt to get to the heart of the real matter of CSR, from both a thematic content and strategic orientation perspective.

This study is based on a sample of 50 firms that operate in the Greek market and belong to the most significant sectors of the national economy. Their CSR disclosures are content-analyzed, providing a body of 836 pragmatic CSR actions.

The key findings of the study denote differences among the examined sectors, with banks and financial services being the most active in terms of CSR actions. Regarding the thematic content, firms choose mainly to implement actions with a societal character, while in terms of strategic orientation, they opt for CSR actions that serve existing cause-related programs without any brand presence. Moreover, profound interest appears for the external business environment, whereas the number of CSR actions with employees’ participation is limited.

The study offers a descriptive account of the actual CSR engagement in Greece amid a prolonged downturn, thus shedding light on the current CSR trends and deficits and helping decision makers embed CSR as an integral part of their business operation.

During adverse economic conditions, this study captures potential discrepancies between the “walk” (doing) and the “talk” (self-reporting) of CSR. In so doing, it contributes to CSR literature by exploring both the “what” and the “how” these actions are implemented.