Search results

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.

Firms increasingly rely on content marketing to trigger user engagement in social media brand communities. The purpose of this paper is to examine how three generic types of marketer-generated content (affiliative, injunctive and utilitarian content) drive user engagement by considering distinct motivational paths and the role of users’ preference for intimate (vs broad) social networks.

The authors conduct a field survey and a scenario experiment among social media users across different brands from three different product categories. They examine the impact of marketer-generated content on user engagement while considering the moderating role of network intimacy (i.e. the mutual confiding within a user’s social network in terms of small social circles) and the mediating role of user motivations (i.e. autonomous vs controlled motivation for community membership).

The findings show that affiliative content (i.e. content that highlights shared values) drives user engagement through autonomous motivation, and utilitarian content (i.e. content that highlights tangible benefits) drives user engagement through controlled motivation. Notably, injunctive content (i.e. content that demands specific user behavior) is not a promising instrument to increase user engagement in social media brand communities when not targeted correctly.

The authors link three generic content types derived from literature on communal systems to user engagement, demonstrate the motivational underpinnings of their translation into engagement behavior and show that network intimacy can explain why the same content type can impact user engagement through two motivational paths.

The authors present three types of content that marketers can craft to trigger users to engage with a brand’s social media community and show when this content is most effective and why. By examining the moderating role of network intimacy, this research aims at providing targeting implications to social media marketers.

This research provides new insights on the effectiveness of marketer-generated content. The authors reveal two motivational paths that compete in explaining the overall effectiveness of different types of marketer-generated content to fuel user engagement. The authors further demonstrate that these relationships depend on the intimacy of a user’s circle of online friends.

The purpose of this paper is to use user-generated content (UGC) on social media platforms to infer the possible place brand identities of two famous metropolitan areas in Bangkok, Thailand, namely, Khaosan Road and Yaowarat (Bangkok’s Chinatown), both of which are famous for their street vendors and nightlife. These two places are interesting study sites because of recent identity conflicts among their stakeholders. The method developed in this research can help other places to better understand place brand identities and, as such, effectively plan for and manage those places.

The author used content analysis to study 782 user-generated images on Flickr and 9,633 user-generated textual reviews of Khaosan Road and Yaowarat from TripAdvisor and Google Maps’ Local Guide. MAXQDA was used to code all the images. User-generated textual reviews were studied using Leximancer. The author also introduced a positivity of concept analysis to identify positive and negative components of place brand identity.

The author developed a place brand identity framework that includes three pillars, namely, place physics, place practices and place personality. Content analysis of the images generated 105 codes and a count of the frequency of the codes that represent place brand identity. Content analysis of textual reviews created the concepts in the three pillars and identified the positive and negative concepts for both places. The results of both image and text analyses showed that street food vending is one of the most salient components of place brand identity for both Khaosan Road and Yaowarat.

The author suggested several place branding strategies for the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration such as turning Khaosan Road into a music scene for both visitors and locals, controlling excessive and aggressive commercialism, sponsoring the production of creative and authentic content, initiating a compelling online campaign that focusses on the items sold in Yaowarat, hosting a spotlight event such as a seafood festival and improving hygiene and walkability.

Both the advancement of digital technologies and the complexity of stakeholders create a need for empirical studies on place branding involving the participation of the widest possible range of stakeholders and studies on the influence of social media. This research is the first to use both image and text analyses to study place brand identity from UGC. The use of both analyses allows the two methods to complement one another while mitigating the weaknesses of each.

This research explores the impacts of content-generating devices (mobile phones versus personal computers) and content features (social content and achievement content) on consumer engagement with marketer-generated content (MGC) on social media. It also examines these factors' interaction effects on consumer engagement.

The study analyzed MGC that 210 companies had posted to Sina Weibo over three years, testing the study’s proposed model with negative binomial regression analysis.

The study's results show that MGC generated via mobile phones attracts more consumer engagement than MGC generated via personal computers. MGC with more social features attracts more consumer engagement, whereas MGC with more achievement features reduces consumer engagement. The authors also found that MGC with more social features generated via mobile phones and MGC with more achievement features generated via personal computers lead to more consumer engagement due to the congruency of the construal level of psychological distance.

This research enriches the literature by exploring the effects of content-generating devices and content features on consumer engagement in the MGC context, which extends the research on consumer engagement with social media from the context of user-generated content to the MGC.

Since its launch in 2005, YouTube has provided a unique platform for users worldwide to share and engage with content, leading to a rise in user-generated content (UGC), especially among youth. One of the most prevalent, yet under-explored, subgenres of UGC is the user-generated music video, where users integrate music and images with an element of performance or narrative; the current research deploys longitudinal analysis to describe the trends in youth-created music videos and how these trends have evolved in the early years of YouTube. Using a sample of 100 youth-created user-generated music videos uploaded to YouTube in 2007 and 2013, the authors investigate trends in production strategies, narrative content, and demographics. Compared to videos posted in 2007, youth-created music videos posted in 2013 featured more complicated editing techniques, less linear narratives, younger actors, more women, and were more likely to celebrate the self, mimicking the recent emergence of “selfie culture.” These findings are discussed with respect to YouTube’s role in reducing barriers to entry and providing a virtual space for youth-oriented content communities that thrive on engagement and social networking as strategies of identity development.

The proliferation of online brand communities has shifted control over brands from firms to consumers. Demonstrating how marketers can stimulate consumers to use these opportunities and engage with the brand in such communities, the purpose of this paper is to address the effectiveness of normative and utilitarian appeals commonly employed in practice for enhancing engagement intensity and brand equity in turn.

This paper presents two studies at an individual user level. The first study builds on matched data on marketing actions, user behavior, and user perceptions from a Facebook brand community. The second study uses an experiment with members of a firm-hosted online brand community. The authors employ seemingly unrelated regressions while controlling for self-selection.

Marketer-generated appeals have a positive effect on brand equity that is mediated by engagement intensity. However, the strength of these effects depends highly on community, user, and relationship characteristics.

Generally speaking, marketer-generated appeals are effective tools for marketers to build brand equity through enhanced user engagement. However, their effectiveness can be improved when managers use a targeted approach. To offer precise managerial guidance, this paper shows how entertainment value, content consumption asymmetry (e.g. whether a user prefers user-generated content over marketer-generated content), and membership duration increase or lower the impact of appeals in building the brand through engagement intensity.

The authors provide evidence that appeals designed to drive user engagement in online brand communities are effective tools for boosting brand equity.

This paper aims to explore the causal relationship of user-generated content (UGC) on trust in UGC (TUGC), destination image (DI) and tourist visit intention (VI) guided by the stimulus-organism-response (SOR) theory. This work further examined the mediating effect of TUGC and DI between UGC and VI.

Data were collected through online and personal-administered surveys and randomized sampling. This work employed partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to test the proposed model empirically.

In line with the SOR Theory, this work found UGCs that induce positive emotions and connection to the users motivate VI rather than UGCs that are predominantly factual. Furthermore, UGCs are considered reliable, authentic and less biased than brand-generated content. The findings of this work contribute to the theoretical understanding of UGC to VI in a destination.

This work proposes that destination marketers prioritize UGC that evokes positive emotions and connections with users, as it is more effective in encouraging VI. Strategies such as incentivizing content creators, improving online presence and engaging influencers can maximize UGC. Enhancing online traffic quality, visibility and interaction and implementing content policies are crucial for UGC's effectiveness. Marketers should align destination products with tourists' interests and collaborate with influencers for affiliate marketing to increase tourist-generated UGC. Furthermore, improved connectivity encourages UGCs about the destination.

In tourism marketing, UGC has become a valuable information source for tourists in making informed travel decisions. UGC is a tourist-generated content that offers factual information and authentic experiences through images, videos or text posted through social media platforms. UGC is considered more reputable than travel firms and the mainstream media as an information source. Due to the limited works on UGC in the literature, the influence of UGC on tourists' VIs has remained unexplored at the time of writing. This work bridges this gap by empirically examining the impact of UGC on Gen Z tourists' VI guided by the SOR theory.

The Internet has changed consumer decision-making and influenced business behaviour. User-generated product information is abundant and readily available. This paper argues that user-generated content can be efficiently utilised for business intelligence using data science and develops an approach to demonstrate the methods and benefits of the different techniques.

Using Python Selenium, Beautiful Soup and various text mining approaches in R to access, retrieve and analyse user-generated content, we argue that (1) companies can extract information about the product attributes that matter most to consumers and (2) user-generated reviews enable the use of text mining results in combination with other demographic and statistical information (e.g. ratings) as an efficient input for competitive analysis.

The paper shows that combining different types of data (textual and numerical data) and applying and combining different methods can provide organisations with important business information and improve business performance.

The paper shows that combining different types of data (textual and numerical data) and applying and combining different methods can provide organisations with important business information and improve business performance.

The study makes several contributions to the marketing and management literature, mainly by illustrating the methodological advantages of text mining and accompanying statistical analysis, the different types of distilled information and their use in decision-making.

This paper aims to examine brand-generated communities from the community managers’ point of view and investigate how social media influences managerial perceptions, attitudes and practises around brand communities.

The literature review examines the most prominent constructs describing consumer groupings around brands. It then focuses on how the term “brand community” has evolved throughout the years and transformed in the social media environment. Research involving one survey and one focus group among agency-employed brand community managers was conducted to explore and interpret their views and their work.

Brand community managers aim to increase platform metrics. They encourage interaction between each user and the brand, but not between users. While they execute pre-planned content calendars handling comments, they do not have the experience and autonomy to foster a communal environment. Finally, managers rely on extrinsic incentives, and even antagonise users, regarding control over the community.

The sample covers the majority of agency-employed brand community managers in one country: Greece. The findings call for a re-examination of the construct of brand community, as well as for a new assessment of groupings consumers form around brands in social media.

For actual brand communities to emerge in social media, community managers should have more training, experience and initiative to tailor content and metrics, use intrinsic incentives and propose engaging activities. The quest for platform-imposed measurements inhibits this opportunity, and so do centralised processes that define global brand management.

The managerial aspect of brand-generated communities is understudied, especially when management is outsourced. This paper provides insight on how platform priorities and managerial practises dilute expectations that consumer-generated communities have created.

This paper aims to examine the role of social media communication, tourist satisfaction and destination brand equity components in enhancing destination brand equity based on the Stimulus – Organism – Response (S-O-R) theory.

The conceptual model and research hypotheses were assessed using covariance-based structural equation modeling (SEM). An online survey was used to collect data from 369 domestic tourists who had traveled to Danang and knew about content related to Danang generated by either DMOs or other users on social media.

Except for the effect of DMO-generated social media communication on tourist satisfaction and the impact of destination brand awareness on destination brand loyalty, the findings confirmed the sequential causal relationships between research concepts based on the S-O-R model.

Future research should explore the proposed model based on comparisons of different nationalities to better understand the impact of cultural factors.

DMOs should associate social media with their marketing strategies to enhance destination brand equity, using cutting-edge technologies to create content and update information in a significant way to make communications by DMOs more effective. The findings especially suggest that UGC plays a vital role in improving brand equity dimensions, so DMOs could exploit UGC to engage existing customers and build relationships with potential customers. This research provides guidance for DMOs to improve their brand equity based on social media.

This study has contributed to the destination marketing literature by applying the S-O-R theory to propose a pathway for effectively increasing destination brand equity and highlight the importance of social media communication as a driver to achieve a hierarchical relationship between destination brand equity components and tourist satisfaction from stimulus to organism (e.g. cognition to affect).