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Tourism destination marketers use videos that incorporate storytelling and visual and audio components to evoke emotional arousal and memorability. This study aims to examine the increase in participants’ level of arousal and the degree of memorability after watching two different videos.

A quasi-experimental study was conducted with 45 participants who watched two destination promotional videos. One video used storytelling whereas the other used scenic images and music. The level of arousal was measured using both tonic and phasic electrodermal activity levels. The memorability of each video was measured after seven days by testing the recall accuracy.

Scenic imagery and music videos were associated with higher-than-average arousal levels, while storytelling videos generated larger-amplitude arousal peaks and a greater number of arousal-evoking events. After a week, the respondents recalled more events from the storytelling video than from the scenery and musical advertisements. This finding reveals that the treatment, storytelling and sensory stimuli in advertising moderate the impact of arousal peaks and memorability.

These results indicate that nonnarrative videos using only sceneries and music evoked a higher average level of arousal. However, memorability was associated with higher peak levels of arousal only in narrative storytelling. This is the first tourism study to report the effects of large arousal peaks on improved memorability in advertising.

Brand storytelling is an effective marketing tool. However, when choosing whether to tell more or tell less, it remains unclear which of these two narrative styles is most effective. This study aims to examine whether blank-leaving(less) leads to favourable brand attitudes and compares its effects on consumers’ story immersion, to non-blank-leaving(more).

Two experiments were conducted to test the hypotheses. In Study 1, a single-factorial design was used with 252 participants assigned at random to one of two narrative conditions: blank-leaving or non-blank-leaving. Study 2 replicated Study 1 and investigated the moderating role of implicit mindsets.

The results show that a blank-leaving narrative style increases favourable brand attitudes. Consumers present deeper immersion in the brand story that uses blank-leaving, as compared to non-blank-leaving, leading to a more favourable brand attitude. Furthermore, this effect is stronger for individuals with growth mindsets.

Telling the brand story using a blank-leaving narrative style is more effective in catching consumers’ attention than non-blank-leaving. In particular, a blank-leaving narrative is a good approach for targeting consumers who have a growth mindset.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first to investigate and compare the effects of blank-leaving and non-blank-leaving narrative styles on brand attitudes in the context of storytelling marketing.

This paper investigates how two characteristics of language, abstractness vs concreteness and narrativity, influence user engagement in communication exercises on innovation targeted to the general audience. The proposed conceptual model suggests that innovation fits well with more abstract language because of the association of innovation with imagination and distal construal. Moreover, communication of innovation may benefit from greater adherence to the narrativity arc, that is, early staging, increasing plot progression and climax optimal point. These effects are moderated by content variety and emotional tone, respectively.

Based on a Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) application on a sample of 3225 TED Talks transcripts, the authors identify 287 TED Talks on innovation, and then applied econometric analyses to test the hypotheses on the effects of abstractness vs concreteness and narrativity on engagement, and on the moderation effects of content variety and emotional tone.

The authors found that abstractness (vs concreteness) and narrativity have positive effects on engagement. These two effects are stronger with higher content variety and more positive emotional tone, respectively.

This paper extends the literature on communication of innovation, linguistics and text analysis by evaluating the roles of abstractness vs concreteness and narrativity in shaping appreciation of innovation.

This paper reports conceptual and empirical analyses on innovation dissemination through a popular medium – TED Talks – and applies modern text analysis algorithms to test hypotheses on the effects of two pivotal dimensions of language on user engagement.

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.

Facilitated by image retouch tools, social media influencers can digitally enhance their self-image in product recommendation posts. This paper proposes that image enhancement may serve as a cue for the audience to assess the authenticity of the influencer (“true to oneself”), which further affects the influencer's product recommendation effectiveness (i.e. attitudes toward the post and recommended product).

Experiment 1 examines the effect of image enhancement on consumers' perceived influencer authenticity and product recommendation effectiveness. Experiment 2 considers the moderating role of post type, examining the effects in informational versus storytelling posts.

Consumers perceived an influencer to be more authentic when the image is not enhanced; in turn, consumers reported more favorable attitudes toward the post and the recommended product upon reading the post. The effects are moderated by post type: the effect of image enhancement (through perceived influencer authenticity) exists in posts using an informational message format but is attenuated for those using a storytelling message format.

This research enriches the literature on authenticity cues by documenting a novel visual cue and contributes to influencer marketing by identifying a nuanced interactive effect between image enhancement and post type on recommendation effectiveness.

Beneficiary photos on charity appeals are believed to engender prosocial behavior. This study explores photo framing of healthy and unhealthy beneficiary photos in the context of photo-rich online medical crowdfunding. Based on framing theory, emphasis framing effect (i.e. unhealthy photos only vs both healthy and unhealthy photos) and equivalency framing effect (i.e. healthy photos prior to unhealthy photos vs unhealthy photos prior to healthy photos) are identified.

A scenario-based experiment with 135 participants was used to empirically test the proposed research hypotheses. The subjects were randomly assigned to three treatment groups, with 45 subjects in each group. ANOVA, linear regression, and multiple mediation analysis were used to analysis data.

The results reveal that disclosing both healthy and unhealthy photos can elicit stronger sympathy and perceived need than merely disclosing unhealthy photos. Moreover, the order of unhealthy photos prior to healthy photos leads to a higher level of sympathy than the order of healthy photos prior to unhealthy photos. Furthermore, sympathy and perceived need are positively related to donation intention.

First, this study extends the photo-related research limited to certain characteristics of a single photo to the sequence effect of multiple photos. Second, this study contributes to framing theory by introducing photo framing, particularly the equivalence and emphasis framing effect of beneficiary photos. Finally, this study reveals the emotional and cognitive routes through which beneficiary photos stimulate prosocial behavior. It also offers practical guidance in the aspects of the framing effect of beneficiary photos for crowdfunding management.

Most new media research focuses on behavior as a measure of engagement, while the psychological state of being occupied with its content has received little attention. This study examined news engagement beyond pure action observation by exploring young people’s psychological experiences with the news.

The study carried out a digital native’s survey on 212 people (18–28 years). The focus of the survey was on understanding individuals’ engagement with online news using affective and cognitive components. The authors compared the influence of each type of engagement on youth consumption of and attitudes toward online news.

The results of the hierarchical regression analysis showed that affective engagement can be a stronger predictor of online news consumption than cognitive engagement. While affective engagement significantly predicts positive attitudes toward online news, cognitive engagement had no significant effect.

These findings suggest that “engaging the heart” is more influential than “engaging the mind” in drawing young people to the news in today’s information environment. The study thus contributes to the understanding of the cognitive and emotional focus on news content and their importance in shaping young people’s expectations of online news. The findings from this study could have broader implications for future trends in online news consumption.

Scholars of persuasion have long made a distinction between appeals to logic, emotion and authority- logos, ethos and pathos- but ideas developed to account for live face-to-face conversation processes must also be tested in new media. We aimed to test the effectiveness of these three strategies in one-to-one chats through different communication media.

With a 3 × 3 × 2 between-subject factorial design, we tested these three strategies in one-to-one chats (female–female or male–male pairs) through three communication media: face-to-face, Skype video or Skype text. The persuasion scenario was adapted from prior studies in which students were presented with the idea of requiring a comprehensive exam as part of their degree. The participants were all undergraduate students of a major university in USA.

Our results showed trivial differences between female–female and male–male conditions. The logos appeal worked best overall in persuading the participants to change their reported attitudes. Additionally, the explanations provided by the participants for their own opinions were most like the persuasion scripts in the logos condition compared to the other two appeal conditions. Separately, participants indicated some disapproval of the pathos appeal in the text-based chat condition, although this did not seem to make a difference in terms of actual attitude change.

One major limitation of our study is that our subjects are college students and therefore are not representative of Internet users in general. Future research should test these three types of persuasion strategies on people of diverse backgrounds. For example, while logos seems to be most effective strategy in persuading college students (at least in our study), pathos or ethos may be more effective when one attempts to persuade people of different backgrounds.

Although it is enough for a statistical test, our sample size is still relatively small due to constraints on time, personnel and funding. We also recognize that it is challenging both conceptually and empirically to compare the effectiveness of three persuasion strategies separately.

Our findings suggest it is helpful to use fact-checking tools to combat disinformation in cases where users may not have sufficient domain knowledge or may not realize the need to identify or examine the given information. Additionally, it may require more effort to negate the impact of the disinformation spread than correcting the information, as some users may not only believe false information but also may start to reason in ways similar to those presented in the disinformation messages.

Past studies on online persuasion have limitedly examined whether and how communication media and persuasion strategies interact in one-to-one persuasion sessions. Our experiment makes an attempt to close this gap by examining the persuasion process and outcome in three different communication media and with three different persuasion strategies.

This study aims to investigate the different attributes of electronic commerce (e-commerce) that determine perceived value and electronic loyalty (e-loyalty) among consumers of online food delivery applications (OFDAs). In this globalized world and competitive environment, e-commerce demands have increased and organizations are giving special attention to web development, website design and functions to hold the current consumers with sustainable performance in the globalized and competitive environment. Almost every industry has been affected by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and changed the way of operational work in many industries. Similarly, the food industry is facing serious challenges and now restaurants started heavily depending on OFDAs.

The study was quantitative and data were collected from 509 consumers of the district of Rawalpindi, Punjab Pakistan by using a convenience sampling technique who was the users of OFDAs to evaluate the proposed research model. Confirmatory factor analysis was applied to evaluate the validity of the constructs, and structural equation modeling was employed to test the model through Smart-PLS.

Our findings revealed that perceived value has a substantial positive impact on electronic loyalty (e-loyalty). Moreover, results confirmed that perceived value mediates the relationship of electronic privacy (e-privacy), electronic security (e-security), electronic payment (e-payment), usability and electronic innovativeness (e-innovativeness) with e-loyalty.

This study added to the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) and technology acceptance model (TAM) by exploring consumers’ intentions for using OFDAs in the framework of e-commerce attributes, perceived value and e-loyalty. Similarly, the study enabled the author to learn more about how people would use the information system after successfully applying the UTAUT.

This study has significant implications for web developers, application designers, food delivery companies, restaurants and other businesses. Subsequently, it indicates the importance of the incredible attractiveness of OFDAs in boosting users’ intentions to keep using the application.

This research contributes substantially to OFDAs efforts to continuously increase its meal service platform and improve client satisfaction which resulted in repurchase intent. In addition, the research facilitates OFDA firms to enhance the features of their applications according to clients.

Despite entrepreneurial linguistic style gaining increased attention in entrepreneurship studies, the field for digital vlogger entrepreneurs still lacks a comprehensive understanding of how linguistic patterns enhance audiences attitude and behaviour. This study aims to propose a conceptual model of “language-mental imagery-attitude-behaviour model” that leads to the examination of rich sensory language style of food travel vlogger entrepreneurs and its persuasive effect on audiences' attitude and behavioural intention.

The present study utilises a stimulus-based survey method that involves a sensory-rich vlog script extracted from a high social media engagement authentic vlog. Data are collected through an online questionnaire distributed to a sample of 355 participants via the Amazon Turk mechanism. The study employs confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modelling to test the proposed hypotheses, with the aim of contributing to the advancement of theories of embodied cognition in entrepreneurial language by examining the attitudes and behaviours of audiences exposed to sensory-rich language. The findings of this research provide valuable insights into the effects of sensory-rich language on audience responses and can inform future research on the role of embodied cognition in entrepreneurial communication.

The findings demonstrate that vlogger entrepreneurial sensory-rich linguistic communication style positively influence audiences' attitude, behavioural involvement with food and intention to taste. Visit intention will be enhanced via the mediating effects of attitude, behavioural involvement with food and intention to taste.

This research highlights the significance of sensory-rich language for vlogger entrepreneurs in entrepreneurial communication, digital storytelling and for destination marketing enterprises in creating a digital sensory engagement marketing strategy.

The study contributes to the literature by elucidating the theories of embodied cognition in entrepreneurial communication. By examining the relationships between vlogger communication evoked mental imagery, audiences attitude and behaviours, this study provides novel insights into the effectiveness of sensory-rich language in vlogger entrepreneurial communication and its impact on audience engagement. These findings have important implications for communication scholars and practitioners alike, shedding light on the role of embodied cognition in entrepreneurial language and the potential of sensory-rich language to enhance audience engagement.