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This study examines the interplay between media-induced emotional crisis framing (anger vs sadness) and message sidedness of crisis response on publics’ attribution of crisis responsibility as well as subsequent company evaluation and supportive behavioral intention.

A 2 (emotion: anger vs sadness) x 2 (crisis response: one-sided vs two-sided) online experiment was conducted among 161 participants in the USA.

Results showed that anger-inducing media framing of the crisis elicited higher levels of crisis responsibility attribution and more negative company evaluation, compared with sadness-inducing media framing. One-sided message response was more effective than two-sided message response in lowering attribution of crisis responsibility when sadness was induced, but no difference was found under the anger-induced condition. Attribution of crisis responsibility fully mediated the effects of emotional crisis framing on company evaluation and supportive behavioral intention toward the company.

This study is among the first to examine the interaction effect between emotional media framing and response message sidedness in an ambiguous crisis. Drawing on the interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks, this study integrates the situational crisis communication theory, appraisal-tendency framework and message sidedness in persuasion literature. As such, it contributes to theoretical development in crisis communication and offers communication managers guidance on how to effectively address emotionally framed crises.

Effective post-disaster communication is essential for destination marketing organizations to encourage visitors following natural disasters. This research aimed to analyze the impact of two typical types of post-disaster communication messages – solidarity messages and testimonial messages – on post-disaster visiting intention. This research proposes effective communication strategies for post-disaster destination marketing.

For the case of Jiuzhai Valley, China, which experienced market recovery after two years of rebuilding following a 2017 earthquake, this study designed three contextual experiments based on post-disaster communication scenarios on the Internet and social media to test the causal chain between recovery message types and post-disaster visiting intentions. The data were analyzed using analysis of variance, independent samples t-tests, and the bootstrap method.

The results indicate that both solidarity messages and testimonial messages evoked higher visiting intention than the no-message group. However, solidarity messages (vs testimonial messages) were more effective when shared on the destination management organization's official account than when they were shared on an influencer's account, with their effects being mediated by the symbolic – as opposed to the hedonic – value of tourist behavior.

Destination management organizations should actively carry out marketing communication through the Internet and social media for areas that have experienced disasters. Crisis communicators should consider inviting popular social media influencers to visit the destination and share their experiences to enhance market confidence, while also paying more attention to the operation of official social media accounts.

This study sheds light on the use of the Internet and social media as tools for post-disaster marketing. By expanding on post-disaster communication theory, this study fills a research gap regarding the effectiveness of tourism marketing strategies after a crisis.

This study examines the use of dark humor in brand-to-brand communications on social media and its impact on consumers' brand perceptions. In particular, this study looks at roasting messages in which a brand humorously insults its peers.

The authors used a sampling method to recruit 286 participants from the United States. They employed an ANOVA and Tukey's post hoc analysis to test the hypotheses, as well as Hayes' PROCESS to test the mediation and moderation effects, including Johnson–Neyman procedure.

The authors found that not all customers find roasting messages funny. Rather, consumers' personality and age will influence their perceived humor of the messages and their brand evaluations. Customers who are young and extroverted are likely to believe roasting messages to be funny. They thus perceive the brand to be cooler and more sincere when using such a communication approach, compared to when the brand neutrally interacts with others. Meanwhile, brands may find less success with old and introverted customers.

This research sheds light on how the consumers' perception of humor in a roasting type of brand-to-brand communication has an impact on consumers' psychological perceptions of brand coolness and brand sincerity. To guide practitioners, it explored how the interaction between a consumer's personality and age moderates the aforementioned relationship.

The objectives of this study are threefold: to delineate the phenomenon of “You Share, We Donate” (YSWD) campaigns and what distinguishes them from sales-based cause-related marketing; to contrast the effectiveness of YSWD and sales-based cause-related marketing campaigns and provide an explanation for the differences in the effectiveness; to explore boundary conditions of the proposed differences.

Three experiments were conducted to empirically test the differential effect of campaign formats (i.e. YSWD vs sales-based cause-related marketing), the underlying mechanism and structural as well as contextual features moderating the differential effect.

The findings suggest that YSWD messages elicit consumers’ message-sharing intentions more than traditional cause-related marketing messages. The effect is explained by consumers’ sense of empowerment and can be enhanced through donation cap non-specification. The findings further indicate that YSWD campaigns are especially fruitful in low power distance cultures.

This study contributes toward corporate donation campaign literature by focusing on the usage of social media.

From a managerial perspective, this research provides marketers with guidelines on how to choose between the two cause-related marketing campaign formats and how to enhance the effectiveness of YSWD campaigns.

This paper extends cause-related marketing literature by not only introducing the phenomenon of YSWD campaigns to the literature but also exploring strategies to enhance the effectiveness of such campaigns and shedding light on an outcome beyond the sales impact of cause-related marketing campaigns, i.e. an increase of visibility in social media. From a managerial perspective, this research provides marketers with guidelines on how to choose between the two cause-related marketing campaign formats and how to enhance the effectiveness of YSWD campaigns.

Fact-checking is a process of seeking and displaying facts to confirm or counter uncertain information, which reduces the spread of fake news. However, little is known about how to promote fact-checking posts to online users on social media. Through uncertainty reduction theory and message framing, this first study examines the effect of fact-checking posts on social media with an avatar on online users' trust, attitudes, and behavioral intentions. The authors further investigate the congruency effects between promotional message framing (gain/loss/neutral) and facial expressions of the avatar (happy/angry/neutral) on online users' trust, attitudes, and behavioral intentions in the second study.

The authors conducted two studies and statistically analyzed 120 samples (study 1) and 519 samples (study 2) from Facebook users.

Results showed that including the neutral facial expression avatar in fact-checking posts leads to online users' greater trust and more positive attitudes. Furthermore, the congruency effects between loss message framing and the angry facial expression of the avatar can effectively promote online users' trust and attitudes as well as stronger intentions to follow and share.

This study offers theoretical implications for fact-checking studies, and practical implications for online fact-checkers to apply these findings to design effective fact-checking posts and spread the veracity of information on social media.

The purpose of this study is to develop a model for investigating the sharing of harmful messages by employees using social media using the conspiracy theory from a socio-legal perspective. This study also examines the moderating role of different demographic parameters such as age, gender and education toward sharing harmful messages using social media.

Using the conspiracy theory and social impact theory as the foundation of this study, the authors developed theoretical model and validated it using the structural equation modeling technique with 342 participants from various organizations across Europe and Asia. The study also used different statistical measures to understand the demographic impacts toward sharing harmful messages.

It was found that epistemic, existential and social motives significantly and positively influence employees’ inappropriate message-sharing and seeking behavior, which in turn influences them to share harmful messages on social media. The study also indicates that there are some moderating impacts of employee demography toward sharing harmful messages using social media platforms.

This study investigates the antecedents of sharing harmful messages using social media by employees. The present study could be useful for the organizations leaders as well as policymakers and legal fraternity. The study uses a limited number of feedback to validate the model. Also, this is a cross-sectional study which is another limitation of this study.

This study has proposed and validated a theoretical model by using the conspiracy theory as well as the social impact theory which is unique. Moreover, this study adds value to the existing literature on the harmful impacts of social media and its societal impacts. Besides, the validated model of this study has a high explanatory power which is another uniqueness of this study.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how users on social media view brands with a heritage. Consumers commonly post opinions and accounts of their experiences with brands on social media. Such consumer-generated content may or may not overlap with content desired by brand managers. Drawing from “The medium is the message” paradigm, this study text-mines user narratives on Twitter1 to shed light on the role of social media in shaping public images of brands with heritage through the lens of the stereotype content model.

The study uses a data set of almost 80,000 unique tweets on 12 brands across six categories, compares brands high versus low in heritage and combines dictionary-based content analysis with sentiment analysis.

The results indicate that both user-generated content and sentiment are significantly more positive for brands low rather than high in heritage. Regarding warmth, consumers use significantly more positive words on sociability and fewer negative words on morality for brands low rather than high in heritage. Regarding competence, tweets include more positive words on assertiveness and ability for low-heritage brands. Finally, overall sentiment is more positive for brands low rather than high in heritage.

Important from co-creation and integrated marketing communication perspectives, the findings provide brand managers with actionable insights on how to more effectively use social media.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is among the first to examine user-generated content in a brand heritage context. It demonstrates that heritage brands, with their longevity and strong links to the past, need to be aware of how contemporary social media can detract from their image.

This study aims to explore the role of the linguistic style used in the brand-posted social media content on consumer engagement in the Fintech domain.

A total of 3,286 tweets (registering nearly 1.35 million impressions) published by 10 leading Fintech unicorns in India were extracted using the Twitter API. The Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) dictionary was used to analyse the linguistic characteristics of the shared tweets. Negative Binomial Regression (NBR) was used for testing the hypotheses.

This study finds that using drive words and cognitive language increases consumer engagement with Fintech messages via the central route of information processing. Further, affective words and conversational language drive consumer engagement through the peripheral route of information processing.

The study extends the literature on brand engagement by unveiling the effect of linguistic features used to design social media messages.

The study provides guidance to social media marketers of Fintech brands regarding what content strategies best enhance consumer engagement. The linguistic style to improve online consumer engagement (OCE) is detailed.

The study’s findings contribute to the growing stream of Fintech literature by exploring the role of linguistic style on consumer engagement in social media communication. The study’s findings indicate the relevance of the dual processing mechanism of elaboration likelihood model (ELM) as an explanatory theory for evaluating consumer engagement with messages posted by Fintech brands.

This study aims to explore the spillover effects of data breaches from a consumer perspective in the e-commerce context. Specifically, we investigate how an online retailer’s data breach affects consumers’ privacy risk perceptions of competing firms, and further how it affects shopping intention for the competitors. We also examine how the privacy risk contagion effect varies depending on the characteristics of competitors and their competitive responses.

We conducted two scenario-based experiments with surveys. To assess the spillover effects and the moderating effects, we employed an analysis of covariance. We also performed bootstrapping-based mediation analyses using the PROCESS macro.

We find evidence for the privacy risk contagion effect and demonstrate that it negatively influences consumers’ shopping intention for a competing firm. We also find that a competitor’s cybersecurity message is effective in avoiding the privacy risk contagion effect and the competitor even benefits from it.

While previous studies have examined the impacts of data breaches on customer perceptions of the breached firm, our study focuses on customer perceptions of the non-breached firms. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the first to provide empirical evidence for the negative spillover effects of a data breach from a consumer perspective. More importantly, this study empirically demonstrates that the non-breached competitor’s competitive response is effective in preventing unintended negative spillover in the context of the data breach.