Brand engagement in self-concept and consumer engagement in social media: The role of the source

This three-group between-subjects experimental research investigates the extent to which consumer engagement with a social media branded post is directly affected by individuals’ tendency to incorporate brands as part of their self-concept (BESC) and whether this relationship is moderated by individuals’ exposure to three different post source types. Participants were exposed to one of three Instagram social media posts of a luxury brand, where the only manipulated factor was the type of source. Findings show that there is a positive relationship between BESC and post engagement. The study also shows that content source plays a moderating role in the relationship between BESC and post engagement, such that individuals with high BESC will engage significantly more with content posted by other users, compared with branded sources (brand, influencer).     

Risky business: How social psychology can help improve corporate risk management

Drawing on research in management theory, risk analysis, and the social sciences, this installment of Business Law & Ethics Corner promotes diversity of thought in corporate governance as not only beneficial to business growth and creativity, but also imperative to managing risk successfully. The article begins with a review of four major worldviews and the risk preferences of each. Next, it examines psychological processes that guide human decision making and greatly influence risk perception. The article then applies these worldviews and psychological phenomena to the case of risk management. It offers a critique of current risk management practices, drawing on evidence from the 2007–2008 financial crisis. The article concludes by promoting increased diversity of worldviews in corporate governance as a way to prevent the same risk blindness that led to the Great Recession.     

Inside your social media ring: How to optimize online corporate reputation

Although it is well accepted that corporate communication has a direct impact on corporate reputation, little is known about the link between firms’ social media communication strategies and the formation of firms’ reputations in an online environment. This article contributes to this body of knowledge by studying the impact of social media communication strategies on firms’ reputations. The setting for our study is the hotel industry. The results offer insights regarding the challenges of developing online communication strategies that affect corporate reputation.     

The impact of pronoun choices on consumer engagement actions: Exploring top global brands' social media communications

To enhance the understanding of consumer engagement with brand content on social media, this study examines how pronoun choices affect different types of consumer engagement (e.g., likes, comments, shares) by simultaneously exploring five different pronoun types (first-person singular, first-person plural, second person, third-person singular, and third-person plural). Furthermore, this study explores how the effects of these linguistic (pronoun) choices vary across two brand classifications: characteristics (hedonic vs. utilitarian) and offerings (goods vs. services). The proposed multivariate Poisson regression model, analyzing 15,788 unique brand posts from Facebook over an 8-month period, reveals differences in engagement due to pronoun usage across brand classifications. These results offer a deeper understanding of how the way brands talk to consumers on social media platforms influences consumers' attitudes (likes), propensity to engage with the brand (comments), and willingness to share branded content with their social networks (shares) across different brand classifications.     

Retailer corporate social responsibility and consumer citizenship behavior: The mediating roles of perceived consumer effectiveness and consumer trust

Retailers often face pressure from stakeholders to address social and environmental issues. The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of retailer corporate social responsibility (CSR) on consumers' perceptions and behavior. Drawing on the theoretical foundations of social identity theory and signaling theory, this study presents and validates a unique model which examines the mediating effects of perceived consumer effectiveness and consumer trust on the relationship between retailer CSR and consumer citizenship behavior. Using a sample of 407 consumers in China, results of structural equation modeling show that retailer CSR is positively associated with consumer citizenship behavior. Additionally, perceived consumer effectiveness and consumer trust positively mediate this association. Taken together, these findings provide support for retailers to develop CSR programs that remind and reinforce consumers’ perceptions about socially responsible behaviors.     

Toward the workplace of the future: How organizations can facilitate digital work

The workplace of the future focuses on how and what work is done, not where and when it is done. Thus, organizations increasingly provide new and innovative information technology (IT) to create the workplace of the future by effectively facilitating digital work. However, digital work means more than just using new, innovative IT. Along with increasing flexibility, employees also crave balance and structure when, for instance, it comes to the blurred boundaries between private and business life. Our article investigates how three organizations from diverse domains establish digital work. Based on our empirical results, we identify four major management challenges that organizations need to overcome in order to introduce digital work environments effectively. Further, we identify lessons learned and derive eight recommendations for organizations to facilitate digital work.     

Social media influencers and consumer engagement: A review and future research agenda

The rise of social media influencers (SMIs) in the recent decade garnered wide interest from academicians and marketers. Academicians try to understand the effect of influencers on consumer behaviour, while marketers use influencers as part of their strategy to achieve marketing objectives. Although, plenty of practical and conceptual research is available in this area, literature reviews in the domain of SMIs and consumer engagement are scarce as it is still developing, and most of the studies have focused on these two concepts separately. In this study, the authors attempted to combine and understand how social media influencers affect consumers engagement. This systematic review of the literature offers a comprehensive view of previous research on social media influencers and consumer engagement. The study reviewed articles published in the Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC), Scopus, and Web of Science indexed journals till 5 June 2021. To understand consumers' engagement with SMIs, authors identified and theorized the antecedents, decision and outcome of such engagement. It also discusses the influencer-follower parasocial relationship on different social media platforms. The study proposes an integrated conceptual framework that can be further used to test and validate the impact of social media influencer's marketing efforts on consumer engagement. This framework also may serve as a foundation for marketers to develop effective influencer strategies for brand promotions. The review concludes the discussion by highlighting theories, methodology, and context of studies conducted by past researchers.     

The impact of corporate social responsibility on consumer trust: the case of organic food

A critical and notoriously elusive issue in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) research is the impact of Corporate Social Performance (CSP) on the bottom line. Instead of looking for direct correlations between social and financial performance, we hypothesize that the first result of CSR activities is the creation of trust among the stakeholders. A survey conducted on consumers of organic products provided support for our hypothesis, showing that CSP influences consumer trust and that that trust in turn influences consumers' subsequent actions. The findings further suggest that intermediate variables between CSP and Corporate Financial Performance (CFP) may best support a business case for CSR.     

Differentiated consumer forgiveness for different corporate social irresponsibility domains: The moderating role of corporate reputation and patriotism

The extant literature has generally overlooked the differentiated consumer forgiveness regarding corporate social irresponsibility (CSI). Motivated by this, we introduce the construct of patriotism and propose a model (applicable to domestic enterprises in China) to investigate the moderating effect of patriotism and corporate reputation on the relationship between CSI domains (must-be and attractive) and consumer forgiveness; and such effect is mediated by moral judgment. An experiment that uses 483 actual consumers in China as participants was conducted. We find that the must-be CSI has a greater negative impact on consumers than the attractive CSI, and consumers are less likely to forgive the must-be CSI. Meanwhile, moral judgment plays a mediating role in the differential effects of different CSI domains on consumer forgiveness. In addition, high corporate reputation has a buffer effect on both CSI domains for consumers with high patriotism, and has a boomerang effect on the must-be CSI and a buffer effect on the attractive CSI for consumers with low patriotism.     

Environmental factors to maximize social media engagement: A comprehensive framework

Social media is a crucial tool for companies to reach their customers as additional touch point and build brand awareness, but effectively using these platforms to engage with customers remains an area of research. Branded social media posts are aimed to deepen the customer-brand-relationship in form of social media engagement. In this study, we aim to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the factors that influence social media engagement by examining the role of environmental factors, including the type of media and content of brand posts, brand involvement of the company, social media channel used, and cross-channel management strategies. We utilize social cognitive theory as our framework and identify three social media environments that must be considered to create social media engagement: (1) the imposed, (2) the selected, and (3) the created environment. We gather more than 7000 brand posts of twenty global brands using Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram giving insights on the driver of social media engagement. By examining these factors, we aim to provide a framework for understanding the drivers of social media engagement and how companies can effectively use social media to engage with their customers.     

Modeling consumer engagement on social networking sites: Roles of attitudinal and motivational factors

This paper reports on a study that seeks to assess an extended typology of consumer social networking engagement behaviors. Drawing on uses and gratifications theory, this study assesses consumer engagement with social media, where consumer engagement incorporates consumer responses to marketing communications. The paper argues that certain motivations for social media use serve as antecedents to general attitudes toward social networking sites, which subsequently affects attitudes toward marketers' social networking sites. These attitudes then influence subsequent consumer engagement behaviors. The results show that social facilitation motivation, participating and socializing motivation, and information motivation positively influence consumers' general attitudes toward social networking sites, which had a strong effect on their attitude toward marketers' social networking sites. The relationship between attitudes toward social networking sites and engagement with social networking sites was mediated by attitudes toward marketers’ social networking sites also mediated. The current study brings together the online advertising perspective and the consumer motivation/gratifications perspective of using social media in branding and marketing into a conceptual model that holds up to empirical testing. The paper ends with a discussion of some limitations of the study and proposes avenues for future research.     

Employee brand engagement on social media: Managing optimism and commonality

This article considers how employees engage with B2B firms on social media, a topic that is largely overlooked in the extant brand engagement literature. Using the results from a large-scale study of employee brand engagement on social media, we identify two key drivers of employee brand engagement using the content analysis tool DICTION—namely, optimism and commonality. Employees of top-ranked and -rated firms express higher levels of optimism and commonality in their reviews of their employers on social media than do their counterparts in bottom-ranked and -rated firms. This permits the construction of a 2 × 2 matrix that allows managers to diagnose strategies for increasing or improving employee brand engagement. This creates four different kinds of employee brand engagement situations, and offers human resources and marketing managers different strategies in each case. We demonstrate how practitioners and scholars can shed new light on the way stakeholders engage with brands.     

The effects of corporate social responsibility and price on consumer responses

This experiment examined the influence of corporate social responsibility and price on consumer responses. Scenarios were created to manipulate corporate social responsibility and price across two domains (environment and philanthropy). Results from a national sample of adults indicate that corporate social responsibility in both domains had a positive impact on evaluation of the company and purchase intent. Furthermore, in the environmental domain corporate social responsibility affected purchase intent more strongly than price did.     

eWOM and the importance of capturing consumer attention within social media

Word-of-mouth (WOM) is widely regarded as one of the most influential factors impacting consumer behavior, yet traditional models were constructed oblivious to the potential of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) and social media. In particular, very little is known about the dynamics affecting consumer attention within two-way many-to-many mediated environments even though attention constitutes a critical step. Thus, we construct a conceptual framework that grounds consumer attention within a larger progression of behavioral responses to eWOM. We then conduct an experiment (n = 28) that isolates contextual antecedents of attention to positive, negative, and neutral WOM for both luxury and non-luxury brands within a social media platform. Using behavioral eye-tracking, we find that WOM message valence interacts with brand type to affect attention differently. Implications of these findings for facilitating eWOM are discussed with future research directions suggested.     

Corporate social responsibilities,consumer trust and corporate reputation: South Korean consumers' perspectives

This study proposes and tests a model of corporate social responsibility (CSR) that specifies relationships among (1) four categories of CSR initiatives as independent variables, (2) three types of consumer trust as mediating variables, and (3) corporate reputation as the dependent variable. Results show that the firm's fulfillment of economic and legal CSR initiatives had a direct positive effect on corporate reputation, whereas neither ethical nor philanthropic CSR initiatives did. In the CSR-trust link, economic performances fostered consumer expertise trust, legal and ethical CSR activities affected integrity trust, and philanthropic CSR activities influenced social benevolence trust in the firm. This study confirms that all three types of trust partially or fully mediate the effect of the four CSR initiatives on corporate reputation. This outcome indicates that CSR activities create and nurture consumers' trust in the company, which will, in turn, bring about consumers' positive or improved perceptions of the firm.     

The impact of social media conversations on consumer brand choices

This paper estimates the impact of social media conversations on consumer valuation of brand characteristics and demand for carbonated soft drinks (CSDs). We formulate a random coefficient, discrete choice model of consumer demand that includes social media conversations, and estimate it matching Nielsen sales data on carbonated soft drinks to social media conversations on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Empirical results indicate that consumers’ conversations about brands and nutritional aspects of CSDs have a significant impact on their valuation of brand characteristics and ultimately on their choices of CSDs. These findings have important implications not only for firms using social media as a strategic tool for effective brand promotion and product design but also for public health policies aimed at reducing the consumption of sugary beverages and high-calorie foods.     

Examining the relationship between negative media coverage and corporate social responsibility

This study investigates the relationship between negative media coverage and corporate social responsibility (CSR). We suggest that CSR can compensate for the loss of legitimacy in a firm only when it receives negative media coverage of a given magnitude. Using a sample of Chinese listed firms, the results suggest that in relation to CSR, negative media coverage has an inverted U-shaped curve. When we explore two industrial-level boundary conditions, we find that this nonlinear relationship is more pronounced in firms with higher industrial concentration and dynamism. The results are robust after controlling for endogeneity. This study contributes to CSR and communication literature by deepening our understanding of the nonlinear impact of negative media coverage on firms.     

Moderators of the negativity effect: Commitment,identification, and consumer sensitivity to corporate social performance

Numerous studies have identified constructs such as commitment and brand familiarity as moderators of negativity effects. However, boundary conditions for this moderation have yet to be identified within a retailing context. This study tries to rectify this gap in the literature. This study finds that three factors (commitment, consumer–company identification, and consumer sensitivity to corporate social performance) moderate attitude change toward a retailer following exposure to moderately negative (vs. positive) publicity. However, given extremely negative information, the buffering effects of the moderating factors disappear, and attitude changes are significant for all consumers. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Media governance and corporate social responsibility of media organizations: an international comparison

Media companies are increasingly becoming aware of the importance of their reputation. In order to legitimate themselves, they are starting to present themselves as ‘good corporate citizens’ by engaging in media governance and corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities. The communication of those activities is crucial for the building of reputation. However, to date, no comprehensive studies have been conducted to evaluate the communication of media governance and CSR activities of media organizations. This study aims to fill this gap and examined websites and reports of selected media organizations in Germany, Italy, France, Austria, and Switzerland. Results indicate that public service media organizations communicate proportionally more on media governance than private media organizations, which may be due to the fact that public service media organizations feel more accountable to the public as they have a public service obligation. Concerning the communication of their CSR activities, media organizations focus on society‐oriented measures.     

Organizational attention to corporate social responsibility and corporate social performance: the moderating effects of corporate governance

Many studies have explored the antecedents of corporate social performance (CSP), such as institutional forces and stakeholder pressures. However, few studies examine CSP from a socio‐cognitive perspective. To address this research void, this study adopts an attention‐based approach to examine the relationship between managers' attention to social issues and CSP. More important, this study reports that this relationship will be moderated by governance mechanisms that constrain managerial discretion. Using a sample of Chinese listed firms, this study provides empirical support for these arguments. Therefore, our study adds new insights to the literature addressing CSP from a socio‐cognitive perspective and speaks to the structural features, both inside and outside organizations, that guide managers' attention.