Abstract: Through 2 studies, this research examined consumer responses to empowerment hashtags in social media-based fashion advertising. The findings of Study 1 indicated that consumers showed more favorable attitudes towards empowerment campaign hashtags than brand name hashtags, and that perceived information value of hashtags meditated the relationship between hashtag type and attitudes toward the hashtags. Furthermore, consumer responses to the two hashtag types varied depending on the “sophistication” dimension of brand personality. Study 2 extended Study 1 by further examining the effects of empowerment hashtags on consumers’ attitudes toward ads and consumer-brand identification. Participants perceived greater information value from empowerment hashtags, showed more favorable attitudes toward the ads with empowerment hashtags, and identified more strongly with advertised brands. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
Topic: branded content
Do Human Values matter for Promoting Brands on Social Media?: How Social Media Users’ Values influence their Engagement with Sharing, Content Creation and Reviews.
Abstract: This study posits that human values can be used to identify and segment audiences for social media‐based valuable brand activities. Three online surveys were conducted with Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram users (ages 18–34) on Amazon Mechanical Turk (N = 491). The relationship between social media users’ values and their reported social media activities was examined. Findings indicate that the human values examined (conservation, self‐enhancement, openness to change and self‐transcendence) are significant drivers of valuable brand‐related social media activities. Companies should address conservation‐driven users in order to elicit brand sharing and creation activities. Companies should target conservation‐driven users for sharing promotions, self‐enhancement‐driven users for sharing informational content and writing of product reviews, and openness to change‐driven users for user-generated content. Businesses should further highlight their corporate social responsibility efforts as a negative relationship is found between users’ self‐transcendence values and brand activities. Recommendations are provided on how brands can address users’ values in their social media marketing to motivate sharing of branded content and content creation.