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Successful social marketing campaign to promote COVID-19 vaccination for the unvaccinated relies on increasing positive reactions but also reducing negative responses to persuasive messages. This study aims to investigate the relative effects of narrative vs non-narrative public service announcements (PSAs) promoting COVID-19 vaccination on both positive and negative reactions. Using social media as a tool for disseminating marketing campaigns provides a great opportunity to examine the effectiveness of narrative PSAs on vaccination intention, especially among unvaccinated young adults, who were the target audience of the social marketing. This study explores the role of empathy and psychological reactance as underlying mechanisms.

An experiment involving unvaccinated young adults was conducted with a one-factor, two-condition (message type: narrative vs non-narrative) design.

Results indicated that the narrative (vs non-narrative) PSAs led to greater empathy. While no direct effects of message type emerged on psychological reactance or vaccination intention, results of a serial multi-mediator model confirmed that empathy and psychological reactance mediated the effects of message type on vaccination intention.

The study extends the understanding of narrative persuasion by examining an underlying mechanism behind narrative persuasion in a COVID-19 PSA. This study provides empirical evidence of the important role of empathy in processing narrative PSAs. Moreover, the current study expands narrative persuasion’s applicability to COVID-19 vaccination intervention messages for unvaccinated young adults, highlighting the effectiveness of narrative persuasion as a social marketing communication tool.

Research is needed regarding how to influence young adults’ patterns of cell phone use while driving, amid social pressures to stay connected to their peers. Such insight could form the basis of a social marketing campaign. This study aims to explore the potential of inoculation and narrative messages as strategies to protect (i.e. generate resistance against) negative attitudes toward texting and driving.

Using a three-phase experiment, the investigation explored the impact of different communication message strategies (i.e. inoculation, narrative, control) aimed at reducing texting while driving.

Results indicated that, for college students exposed to messages in support of texting and driving, inoculation messages were superior to both narrative and control messages. These findings can guide the development of strategic social marketing interventions.

Social marketing scholars and practitioners should consider weaving inoculation messages throughout social marketing campaigns focused on this important issue.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to evaluate and compare inoculation and narrative strategies in the context of texting and driving.

The importance of effective public messages has been widely recognized during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. In particular, the role of news items and interpersonal conversations for the acceptance of public health measures has been highlighted. The authors propose a conceptual model based on the existing literature on how to measure the degree of persuasion of news narratives in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The authors adopted a whole population approach, where the unit of analysis was the population of the media news about the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors selected a sample to develop and test their conceptual model. The sample size was n = 248. The questionnaire was distributed online using a non-probability convenience sampling plan. The authors used a pre-post pseudo-experimental design. Respondents answered questions about their attitude toward the COVID-19 pandemic. After watching a narrative news report on the same subject, they then answered questions designed to measure changes in their attitude. A structural equation model, the Sobel test and a paired samples t-test were used to test hypotheses.

The results showed that there is a significant relationship between narrative with transportation and empathy. There was also a positive and significant relationship between transportation and empathy with attitude and interpersonal talk. The relationship between transportation and self-referencing was also supported. Further, transportation and attitude mediated the relationships between narrative and interpersonal talk, self-referencing as well as empathy. A paired samples t-test revealed that attitudes were changed or reinforced before and after watching the narrative news report.

This paper contributes to the body of knowledge by identifying the outcomes of narrative persuasion during public health crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

When an audience mentally counterargues a spokesperson, the message is backfiring. In such cases, audience members are practically persuading themselves to take the opposite position advocated by the spokesperson. Yet spokespeople who are professional persuaders serving corporations often seem to instill counterargument. This paper examines the role of counterargument as the conduit through which a spokesperson's different message types affect a company during a crisis. The authors explore the paradox of spokespeople's (in)effectiveness by testing divides in research drawn from normative crisis communication theory, narrative persuasion theory and the theory of reporting bias.

Two controlled, randomized experiments are reported. Participants (total N = 828) watch video clips of media interviews of a company spokesperson fielding questions about a scandal.

In the first study, non-narrative information most effectively bolsters purchase intentions and reduces negative word-of-mouth. The effect is mediated by decreased counterargument. The second study replicates the results concerning on-topic narratives compared with spinning, while on-topic narratives and non-narratives perform equally well.

This study addresses conflicts between two distinct traditions of theory as well as between normative crisis communication and its frequent practice. Reducing counterargument matters in the context of non-narrative persuasion, and non-narratives can perform at least as well as narratives in crisis communication.

One of the most prolific areas of misinformation research is examining corrective strategies in messaging. The main purposes of the current study are to examine the effects of (1) partisan media (2) credibility perceptions and emotional reactions and (3) theory driven corrective messages on people's misperceptions about COVID-19 mask wearing behaviors.

The authors used a randomized experimental design to test the hypotheses. The data were collected via the survey firm Lucid. The number of participants was 485. The study was conducted using Qualtrics after the research project was exempt by the Institutional Research Board of a large University in the US. The authors conducted an online experiment with four conditions, narrative versus statistics and individual versus collective. The manipulation messages were constructed as screenshots from Facebook.

The findings of this study show that higher exposure to liberal media was associated with lower misperceptions, whereas higher credibility perceptions of and positive reactions toward the misinformation post and negative emotions toward the correction comment were associated with higher misperceptions. Moreover, the findings showed that participants in the narrative and collective-frame condition had the lowest misperceptions.

The authors tested theory driven misinformation corrective messages to understand the impact of these messages and multiple related variables on misperceptions about COVID-19 mask wearing. This study contributes to the existing misinformation correction literature by investigating the explanatory power of the two well-established media effects theories on misinformation correction messaging and by identifying essential individual characteristics that should be considered when evaluating how misperceptions about the COVID-19 crisis works and gets reduced.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-11-2021-0600

This interdisciplinary study aims to analyze how service organizations communicate sustainable beliefs in their social media narratives and use them to generate brand awareness, customer recognition and ongoing demand for sustainable service.

A two-phase exploratory analysis of 10,342 tweets from 2019–2020 was conducted by sustainable global corporations to identify best practices for their social media teams operating within a service-based business model. First, the significant themes were identified using an unguided machine learning approach of three types of firms: services, goods and mixed. Next, the full set of tweets with linguistic sentiment analysis was analyzed followed by a deeper view of the services-based organizations based on their strategic focus (business-to-business [B2B] versus mixed).

The findings indicate that tweets that appear to create the highest customer engagement are characterized as having high levels of analytical language, high clout (i.e. are socially relevant), a positive tone, a high number of words and a high number of words per sentence. On the other hand, having complex language in terms of six-letter words does not seem to associate with customer engagement. The last level of analysis shows that B2B services-based corporations with positive tone and higher word count exhibit higher levels of retweets. Implications include providing rational and informational tweets to increase engagement and highlight societal relevance.

Climate change has negative consequences on human and physical capital, and ecosystems across the globe. This study provides specific recommendations for how services corporations can increase their sustainable communications and actions.

The key implication of our research is that corporations must strategically design social media narratives about climate change as part of their online branding and communications process.

This study aims to explore consumer motivations to mitigate the contagion effect in access-based consumption after instances of prior customer misbehavior. Reverse contagion, demonstrated through customer citizenship behavior, entails using both firm-provided and personal resources to cocreate value, even in the presence of norm violations by others. The research delves into the influence of empathy, narrative appeal and past misbehavior severity on customer behavior, specifically in the context of reverse contagion.

Two scenario-based studies and a field study were used within the context of scooter-sharing to assess the conceptual model. Study 1 (n = 156) and Study 2 (n = 97) were conducted through surveys. Study 3 (n = 54) was a field study.

The results emphasize the crucial role of empathy in breaking the cycle of misbehavior contagion. Specifically, the findings suggest that narrative appeals have the potential foster greater empathy, encouraging customers to counteract the contagion. However, the intensity of prior misbehavior lessens the efficacy of narrative appeals in triggering reverse contagion, thereby moderating the mediating effect of empathy.

This study investigates reverse contagion stemming from customer misbehavior in accessed-based consumption. It delves into the impact of empathy, narrative appeal and previous misbehavior on the dynamics of value codestruction and cocreation. This comprehensive examination of these factors within a unified framework represents a new contribution to the literature. The results illuminate this intricate phenomenon, offering valuable insights for managers to address adverse customer behavior and harness the positive aspects of reverse contagion.

Prior research has drawn from entrepreneurial practice to conceptualize a variety of discreet narrative types. Research has also demonstrated that narratives are a practical and useful tool for entrepreneurs in many stages of the entrepreneurial process. This paper proposes a new narrative, shared narrative, and a conceptual model for how entrepreneurs might build such a narrative that is strategic in nature.

First, the authors review the types of narrative and introduce shared narrative as an account that narrativizes both the entrepreneur and relevant stakeholders. Then, integrating theoretical concepts from constitutive rhetoric and value co-creation, the authors introduce a conceptual framework as a three-stage process guide for entrepreneurs to build shared narratives for strategic stakeholder engagement. Leveraging the power of shared roles and salient values as the key to pre-story building process, the intended audience of the story (i.e. consumer, investor) is present from the inception of the story and integral to its success.

The authors assert that entrepreneurs need to adopt a shared narrative approach for strategic purposes. Further, the development of a shared narrative begins at the pre-story process of co-creation, focused on identifying the roles and values entrepreneurs share with their various stakeholders. Incorporating these shared roles and salient values into the entrepreneurial narrative will result in a narrative that is compelling, authentic and adaptable to different stages of the entrepreneurial process and for multiple stakeholder audiences. Post-story, this authentic narrative will result in higher levels of engagement from both the audience and the entrepreneur in the form of reciprocal action.

This paper proposes a new narrative and provides a structured process to support entrepreneurs in building shared narratives for strategic engagement with a wide range of stakeholders.

The past is important for various known and unknown reasons. This paper aims to reveal and justify unacknowledged reasons why, when and how managers should consider leveraging the pasts of previously successful but currently declining brands to restore their more desirable historical market positions.

This conceptual paper combines marketing and branding theory with historical branding examples, anecdotes and inductive inferences to develop and justify brand-pastness as a theoretically-grounded and managerially-actionable repositioning concept that could be applied to resurrect declining brands.

The emergent historically-grounded brand-pastness framework generates innovative insights that could be applied in the future. These insights explain when, why and how brand managers could apply brand-pastness to resurrect declining brands. The framework also facilitates the development of a brand-pastness-based research agenda. The agenda is driven by questions structured to address the nature, scope and potential applications of brand-pastness as a new concept and useful repositioning tool.

This paper’s recommendations are limited by their conceptual and inductive origins. However, a research agenda is developed to guide and structure future empirical investigations of the branding antecedents to and consequences of a prospective brand-pastness construct.

This paper introduces, conceptualizes and justifies the potential value of a historically-grounded concept called brand-pastness. The concept may prove beneficial when marketing managers use brand-pastness to reposition and resurrect declining brands by re-instilling targeted consumers’ historical perceptions of brands’ past superiority.