Dwivedi Y. K. et al., including Jooyoung Kim and Sun Joo (Grace) Ahn (published), “Metaverse Marketing: How the metaverse will shape the future of consumer research and practice.” Psychology & Marketing. https://doi.org/10.1002/mar.21767
Abstract: The initial hype and fanfare from the Meta Platforms view of how the metaverse could be brought to life has evolved into an ongoing discussion of not only the metaverse’s impact on users and organizations but also the societal and cultural implications of widespread usage. The potential of consumer interaction with brands within the metaverse has engendered significant debate within the marketing-focused discourse on the key challenges and transformative opportunities for marketers. Drawing on insights from expert contributors, this study examines the marketing implications of the hypothetical widespread adoption of the metaverse. We identify new research directions and propose a new framework offering valuable contributions for academia, practice, and policy makers. Our future research agenda culminates in a checklist for researchers which clarifies how the metaverse can be beneficial to digital marketing and advertising, branding, services, value creation, and consumer wellbeing.
Abstract: Consumers are increasingly in support of sustainable marketing and demarketing has received attention as a viable strategy in response to this growing sentiment. As only a few studies focused on testing demarketing in the context of mindful or anti-consumption, this study tested the effects of practical elements such as a company’s mission commitment level to the cause and corporate social responsibility (CSR) credibility between traditional green advertising and demarketing advertising. Consumer ratings for the green advertising exceeded that of demarketing advertising only under certain conditions (e.g., low impact mission commitment given low CSR credibility, high impact mission commitment given high CSR credibility). There were no conditions where demarketing outperformed the green ad. A generally higher processing disfluency towards demarketing might have been a contributing factor. Further, perceived company integrity was a significant mediator that drove consumer ratings. These results provide an in-depth discussion regarding the viability of demarketing campaigns.
Abstract: The role of media context in advertising has been the subject of interest for marketers and media practitioners over the past fifty years. However, there remains a lack of clarity on the relationship between media context and advertising outcomes. To structure previous literature and facilitate knowledge development, this study meta-analytically examines the relationship between media context and attitudinal outcome measures (i.e., consumers’ attitudes toward the ad/brand/product and purchase intentions). A total of 31 years of research findings, 96 studies and 597 effect sizes involving 139,233 research participants were synthesized. The key findings suggest that different media context facets leverage consumers’ attitudes and PI differently. Felt involvement with media, transportation (consumers’ experience of becoming non-volitional and absorbed in the media contexts), and perceived trust/credibility of media vehicles exhibited a stronger influence on attitudes/PI. Media-ad congruence, the most commonly examined media context among objective contexts, resulted in a very weak influence on attitudes/PI. The context effect also differed by advertising-related characteristics and extraneous methodological factors. Accordingly, there is a need for both academia and practice to revisit the media context construct with a fresh eye.
Dongjae (Jay) Lim (Grady PhD Student), TaeHyun Baek, Sukki Yoon, Yeonshin Kim (Forthcoming). Color Effects in Green Advertising,
Abstract: Marketers often use green in marketing communications to signal sustainability, despite the lack of supportive data. This article is a report of two experiments to observe consumer reactions to advertisements that use colour to indicate the environmental friendliness. The pretest and Study 1 confirm that consumers associate green with environmental friendliness and grey with environmental unfriendliness. Thus green (grey) is more (less) effective for producing positive ad attitudes and purchase intentions. Consumer perceptions regarding colour appropriateness mediate the effects. Study 2 shows that persuasion knowledge moderates the effects: when consumers have high persuasive knowledge, green has a less positive effect; grey has a less negative effect; blue remains neutral. The study concludes that green functions as a peripheral cue signalling an eco‐friendly brand image, but the use of green may backfire when consumers are aware that green is used to bias responses.
Abstract: Sports sponsorship has been considered a key branding strategy for various marketing objectives, but little research investigated how consumers perceived sponsor brands through sports competitions. This study aimed to examine whether team performance and gender difference jointly impacted consumers’ perceived brand personality and how team identification and self-brand connection moderated such impacts on perceived brand personality in the context of sports sponsorship. A two (Team performance: win/loss) by two (Gender: male/female) between-subjects experiment was designed with team identification and self-brand connection as two moderators. Results indicated that team performance, team identification, and self-brand connection yielded individual and joint influences on perceived brand personality. Specifically, team performance exerted significant effects on five dimensions of brand personality, while team identification yielded significant effects on brand responsibility, aggressiveness, and simplicity. Self-brand connection moderated the effect of team performance on brand responsibility and activity. The empirical evidence further illustrated that consumer-level factors came into play to influence perceived brand personality. In support of the affect-transfer hypothesis, team performance that evoked emotions greatly impacted consumers’ perceived brand personality, as they rated a sponsor brand as more positive in terms of brand responsibility, activity, aggressiveness, simplicity, and emotionality.
Abstract: Social media-based consumer engagement behaviors, such as sharing, content creation and reviews for brands as more valuable than “liking” or consuming brand content. As consumers trust consumer-driven recommendations more than advertising, brand content shared or created by consumers on social media may drive brand awareness and loyalty. Marketing researchers and practitioners are only recently beginning to understand social media audiences who engage in such behaviors. This is the first study that posits that human values can be used to identify and segment audiences for social media-based brand activities. Three online surveys were conducted with Facebook, Twitter and Instagram users (millennial users, ages 18-34) on Amazon Mechanical Turk (N=491). The relationship between social media users’ values and their reported social media activities were examined. Findings indicate that the human values examined (conservation, self-enhancement, openness to change, self-transcendence) are indeed important drivers of valuable brand-related activities. Specifically, conservation-driven users are most likely to engage in brand sharing and creation activities. Companies should also target conservation-driven users for promotions, self-enhancement-driven users for informational content and reviews, and openness to change-driven users for content creation (user-generated content). Companies should further highlight their corporate social responsibility efforts as there is a negative relationship between self-transcendence values and brand activities. Recommendations are provided on how companies can address users’ values in their social media-based marketing to motivate sharing of branded content (information, promotions, reviews, ads and stories) and creation of brand content (UGC and reviews).
Abstract: Recognizing that fast-food brands are increasingly interested in featuring health and wellness values in their marketing, this study investigated the effect of perceived brand-health issue fit on consumer responses to a fast-food health-marketing initiative. Consistent with previous findings and the schema-congruent framework, the results of the current study indicate that an advertising message with high brand-issue fit, compared to one with low brand-issue fit, elicited more favorable consumer responses. In addition, this study tested two different advertising message strategies (i.e., health issue-focused vs. brand-focused) under high and low brand-health issue fit conditions. In line with the predictions of categorization theory, the health issue-focused advertising message was more effective than the brand-focused advertising message under the low fit condition. The findings have theoretical and managerial implications and can help practitioners develop better marketing and advertising strategies for fast-food health marketing initiatives.
Abstract: This study examined effects of Facebook reaction icons and user comments on brand attitude, trust, information seeking, purchase intention, and eWOM intention towards a health brand, as well as potential moderating effects of SNS use. Results of a 3 (reaction icons: positive/neutral/negative) x 3 (valence of comments: positive/neutral/negative) between-subjects experiment (N = 306) indicated that positive Facebook reaction icons significantly influenced brand attitude, trust, purchase intention, and eWOM intention, while neutral comments significantly impacted brand attitude and trust. The degree of SNS use also negatively moderated between reaction icon valence and eWOM intention. Implications for health marketing communication are discussed.
