Exploring the Challenges of Incorporating Social Media Marketing Strategies in the Restaurant Business

The purpose of this study is to explore the adoption, challenges, and current uses of social media in small restaurants. Past research in this area is scarce, and most focuses on larger establishments. To address the research objectives, 20 small restaurants in Northeastern United States were interviewed. Literature identifies a variety of goals that social media can play in fostering interactions, engagement, relationships, and building communities online, but this study shows that few restaurants attempt to do this. Even though in most small restaurants social media significantly contributes to their marketing strategy, the majority of small restaurants use it as a low-cost advertising tool to gain exposure, generate interest, inform, and spread word of mouth. The study suggests ways in which social media could be embraced by small restaurants to help them address the challenges they face, so they can go beyond using social media as merely an advertising tool.     

Advertising targeting young children: an overview of 10 years of research (2006–2016)

A review of 138 published academic articles was conducted to provide an up-to-date and comprehensive overview of academic research of the past decade (2006–2016) on advertising directed to young children up to 12 years old. The research overview resulted in a conceptual framework comprising five research domains that were found to be most prominent. For each of these five domains, an overview, discussion and future research agenda is presented. We conclude that much of the research of the past decade included food advertising and its effects. Progress has been made in the domain of children's advertising processing, specifically with regard to advertising literacy. Despite the growing importance of embedded advertising, many of the new ad formats remain neglected (e.g. native and mobile advertising). Additionally, only a few studies investigated which executional factors (e.g. humour) are effective in advertisements to target children and social influences are also less often considered.     

Social Media Communications and Marketing Strategy: A Taxonomical Review of Potential Explanatory Approaches

The growth of social media has captured the attention of companies, which have responded by increasing their advertising efforts toward social media users. Previous studies have devoted considerable effort to developing social media marketing strategies, but minimal effort has focused on examining the types of messages presented on firms’ social media platforms to communicate with customers. Practitioners face the challenge of identifying which types of social media message content to choose. In addressing this challenge, this article provides a comprehensive framework of social media content strategy, delivery, and impact on the consumers, including a taxonomical approach that helps firms’ understanding of firm-generated content on social media platforms.     

Why we watch others' responses to online advertising – investigating users' motivations for viewing user-generated content in the context of online advertising

The study investigates Internet users' motivations for viewing user-generated content (UGC) in the context of online advertising. In addition, it is examined whether individual motivation patterns can be traced back to users' personalities and their attitudes toward advertising in general. An online survey of 181 social media users was conducted, surveying users' motivation, personality (big five), and attitude toward advertising in general. Path analysis was employed to examine the research model. The use of UGC was motivated by needs for information, entertainment, personal identity, and social interaction. While personality did not predict users' motives, their attitudes towards advertising in general explained individual motivation patterns to a large extent. It was consequently proposed and confirmed that users' motives mediate the influence of recipients' general attitude toward advertising on UGC usage. Results indicated a strong effective potential for UGC in online advertising: users view such content expressly to be influenced by others fulfilling their needs for information, personal identity and social interaction. Firms may lose some of their ability to precisely control brand messages when advertising in social media.     

Social Consumer Neuroscience: Neurophysiological Measures of Advertising Effectiveness in a Social Context

The application of neurophysiological methods to study the effects of advertising on consumer purchase behavior has seen an enormous growth in recent years. However, little is known about the role social settings have on shaping the human brain during the processing of advertising stimuli. To address this issue, we first review previous key findings of neuroscience research on advertising effectiveness. Next, we discuss traditional advertising research into the effects social context has on the way consumers experience advertising messages and explain why marketers, who aim to predict advertising effectiveness, should place participants in social settings, in addition to the traditional ways of studying consumer brain responses to advertising in social isolation. This article contributes to the literature by offering advertising researchers a series of research agendas on the key indicators of advertising effectiveness (attention, emotion, memory, and preference). It aims to improve understanding of the impact social context has on consumers' neurophysiological responses to advertising messages.     

Negative Consequences of Storytelling in Native Advertising

Native advertising and storytelling are both increasingly popular advertising strategies. This research explores the effectiveness of storytelling in a native advertising context on social media. While most research recommends the use of stories as a way to build trust and relationships with consumers, the current research suggests that in the form of native ads on social media, narratives may be less effective when compared to informational native ads. Two studies find that even when advertising cues such as disclosure labels and brand presence are prominently located, consumers are less likely to recognize the advertising nature of narrative native ads when compared to informational native ads. Lower levels of advertising recognition are associated with increased perceptions of manipulative intentions by the advertiser, which has a negative influence on consumers' attitudes toward the ad. The findings suggest that native ads that clearly communicate their advertising nature through cues such as an informational execution, high brand presence, and prominent disclosure labeling are more effective than a narrative execution style.     

Advertising effectiveness from a consumer perspective

Communication effectiveness research is moving away from investigations of advertising’s forms, content and the degree and type of consumer involvement, to a greater focus on the process of reception and the social and cultural roles that advertising plays in society and in individual lives. This shift in emphasis has been influenced by communication and media studies, which have prioritised the psychological, social and cultural contexts within which consumers relate to commercial information and the roles that advertising media play in their lives. The focus on the ‘receiver’ as the key actor in the advertising communication process has also coincided with increasing interest in consumer culture theory, brand communities and the new service dominant logic of marketing. This paper provides a useful perspective from which to view contemporary developments in advertising effectiveness research, and has important implications for future studies.     

新媒体与广告未来发展——2011年西方广告研究热点评析

本文以西方目前主导性广告学术类六大刊物在2010-2011年间所刊登的188篇学术论文为主要考察对象,整理出比较突出的广告研究热点:社交媒体与广告的研究热潮、互动媒体环境要求新的社会营销模式、植入式广告在新媒体环境中的效果、少数群体的广告也成为了"热点"、广告道德规范、当广告遭遇"回避"、广告效果认知的误区、市场调查的未来发展等八个方面,希望由此勾画出西方广告学术研究发展的最新脉络。     

Ten Years of ‘Social Media Marketing’ Research in the Journal of Promotion Management: Research Synthesis,Emerging Themes,and New Directions

The study synthesizes research in emerging social media marketing domains by analyzing published articles on social media marketing in the Journal of Promotion Management published since 2007. We utilized interpretation and synthesis based assessment for examining the usage of social media marketing concepts with a focus on social media, social networking sites' utilization by firms, social media metrics and social media measurement, consumer decision making, consumer perceptions, and utilizing social media marketing across countries and cultures. We found a fair balance of application of social media variables across studies, even though most of these studies were quantitative. After studying the gaps presented in social media based studies of recently published articles, we present emerging social media marketing themes, new research foci and directions, and tried to build on research implications for both theory and practice.     

Meta-Analysis in Advertising Research

Meta-analyses have become increasingly popular in many fields of the social sciences, including advertising research. The results of meta-analyses attract substantial interest from both scholars and practitioners, as indicated by high citation numbers and widespread dissemination in the media. By summarizing results drawn from a set of studies concerning a specific topic, and by discovering and explaining consistencies and inconsistencies within those results, meta-analysis is an essential step in the process of knowledge accumulation, theory building, and theory testing in science. Many developments in the last years have contributed to the advancement of the method, but they have appeared in disparate literatures. Furthermore, each discipline applies the method in a particular way that corresponds to the major research traditions in a field. However, no attempt to introduce the method to advertising researchers is available. The purpose of this article is therefore to provide a comprehensive overview of the meta-analysis method to advertising researchers that describes the procedures commonly applied in advertising research, that provides a better understanding of the method and evaluation criteria for judging the quality of meta-analyses, and that serves as a starting point for advertising researchers who are interested in conducting a meta-analysis.     

Social media advertising value

This research investigates the antecedents of social media advertising value, and the effect of this advertising value on online purchase intention in transitional economies in Southeast Asia. Moreover, the moderating effect of different types of social media on the relationships between the predictors and social media advertising value is also explored. The field study is conducted in Vietnam, a representative of Southeast Asian transitional economies in the current study. The results show that, in Southeast Asian transitional economies, the three social media advertising beliefs – i.e. informativeness, entertainment and credibility – have positive effects on consumers’ perceived value of social media advertising, which in turn positively influences their online purchase intention. Additionally, on social networking websites, the effects of advertising informativeness and entertainment on advertising value are weaker than those on content community websites. Nevertheless, there is no difference in the effect of advertising credibility on advertising value in both types of social media. Based on the findings presented, theoretical and managerial implications are drawn.     

社会化媒体中消费者生成广告的影响因素模型及作用路径

如今社会化媒体中随处可见消费者对品牌信息的评论、转发以及创作与品牌相关内容的行为,这样的行为对品牌传播产生了极大影响,它相对于传统品牌传播方式更有效。那么社会化媒体中消费者生成广告行为受到何种因素的影响,这些因素之间存在何种内在逻辑关系？本研究采用立意抽样的方式,选择活跃于社会化媒体（微博、微信、美拍）中的消费者作为研究对象,使用扎根理论的开放式编码、主轴编码与选择性编码对访谈材料进行分析,最后结合选择性编码与“故事线”的方式构建了CGA-EESM影响因素模型。该模型显示：环境、经验、刺激与动机是消费者生成广告行为的四个关键影响因素,它们之间存在错综复杂的作用路径。     

Cross-Media Consumption: Insights from Super Bowl Advertising

When viewers engage in cross-media consumption—view television advertising and social media posts on another medium—how do stimuli from multiple screens influence their response? To address this question, we construct a comprehensive dataset to estimate the effects of Super Bowl advertising and the advertised brands' Facebook content on ad likability. The novel insights emerging from the analyses include that: both media directly and significantly impact the response, contributing 60% and 40%, respectively; thinking hurts liking; and an ad's serial position does not matter, which differs from the primacy and recency effects previously reported in advertising studies. This study contributes to the theory and practice by: (i) testing open research questions empirically regarding the complementary effects of two screens; (ii) extracting the formal, analytic, and narrative thinking styles from the actual words in social media comments; and (iii) demonstrating that divided attention across screens has negative consequences on viewer appraisals.     

Can Social Media Campaigns Backfire? Exploring Consumers' Attitudes and Word-of-Mouth Toward Four Social Media Campaigns and Its Implications on Consumer-Campaign Identification

In response to the unprecedented growth of social media, companies are continuously creating unique social media campaigns encouraging customers to share their advertising messages. However, many of these social campaigns end up backfiring. The purpose of this study is to examine consumers' preferences toward 4 social media campaigns and to investigate the impact of positive and negative word-of-mouth and social value on consumer-campaign identification. Using a sample of 525 respondents in Australia, the results show social media campaigns that contain negative messages are more likely to receive negative word-of-mouth while partnering with non-profit organizations may help generate positive word-of-mouth. This study will assist marketing managers to better understand the consumers' perceptions on recent social media campaigns in Australia.     

The Pragmatic and Ethical Barriers to Corporate Social Responsibility Disclosure: The Nike Case

Numerous studies have documented the demand for information regarding corporations’ relationships to society. Much recent research has demonstrated why stakeholders need this information, and how it benefits both companies and the public. These studies suggest numerous methods by which companies can effectively disclose corporate social responsibility (CSR) information to the public, but in practice, reporting this type of information is fraught with legal and ethical uncertainty often unexplored in most literature. This article represents a fresh analysis of the numerous pragmatic consequences and legal and ethical complications inherent in CSR reporting, using Nike Corporation as a case example. The article discusses the theoretical viewpoints surrounding the ethics of CSR disclosure, and presents the case of Nike and the complications it encountered while advertising CSR information. The article ends with an analysis of CSR auditing as a possible solution to companies seeking to improve the method and transparency of social responsibility reporting.     

Media,markets and violence

ABSTRACT

Media have multipronged linkages to violence, and these have been studied in considerable detail in the fields of communication and media studies. With commercialisation of media and the rapid decline of paying subscribers, for their survival in a capitalist economy, media have to rely increasingly on advertising revenues, and on other ways of linking to markets. Portrayals of violence have become reliable vehicles for ensuring media profitability – in terms of generating advertising revenue – as well as for generating revenue streams via related market-developing and market-maintaining ways. With the advent of new media – social media, virtual reality media and Artificial Intelligence (AI)-robotics-sentient media – the nexus of media, markets and violence is beginning to transform. This paper offers concepts and frames to start exploring the new patterns of linkages across media, markets and violence.     

Consumer Culture and Political Ideology Plots in Social Media Campaigns

A number of studies are devoted to explicating global consumer culture and political ideology plots in traditional advertising. Nevertheless, studies of these plots in social media campaigns are scarce. In order to fill this gap, our study examines consumer culture and political ideology plots utilized by global brands in social media advertisements targeted to US Millennials. Employing semiotic analysis, a series of advertisements from automotive, food and beverage, electronics, personal care products, fast food, athletics and financial sectors were evaluated and interpreted. Our findings uncovered one unique main plot labeled “identity-of-self” and three subplots: 1) successful and young living, 2) Peter Pan syndrome, and 3) purposeful connectedness. Implications for practice and directions for future work are suggested.     

The influence of self-construal and materialism on social media intensity: a study of China and the United States

This study investigated the potential influence of self-construal and materialism on intensity of usage for three social media platforms: social networking sites (SNSs), microblogging sites (MBSs), and video sharing sites (VSSs). Data were collected from China and the United States – two countries with the highest advertising expenditures and Internet populations. Drawing from the social comparison theory (SCT) and the framework of independent and interdependent self-construal, results of the hierarchical multiple regressions indicated that both independent and interdependent self-construal were positively related to SNS intensity among Chinese and American users. However, interdependent self-construal had a significant, negative relationship with the intensity of MBS use among users in the two countries. Materialism was found to positively relate to SNS intensity, MBS intensity, and VSS intensity among Chinese and American users. These results provide evidence that self-construal and materialism contribute to social media use independent of nationality. Theoretical and managerial implications for international advertising strategies are discussed.     

Determining perceptions,attitudes and behaviour towards social network site advertising in a three-country context

ABSTRACT

Regardless of the growth in social media and social network advertising (SNA), little theoretical and empirical knowledge exists on the differences between countries, and the perceptions and attitudes towards social network advertising. The purpose of the study is to investigate the relationships between users’ perceptions (personal and societal), their attitudes and their behaviour towards Facebook advertising, across three countries, as well as the moderating role of privacy and general advertising attitudes. Online surveys were administered and a convenience sampling resulted in 1,166 respondents. Structural equation modelling was used to test the proposed model.

The research indicates that the social support theory shows promise for examining the perceptions and attitudes towards SNA. Furthermore, the validity of the conceptual model is confirmed in all three countries; however, the strength of these relationships differs. Additionally, it is evident that consumers’ culture influences the role of privacy and trust in SNA perceptions.     

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.