Pub Date : 2025-02-06DOI: 10.1177/00222429251319786
Barbara Duffek, Andreas B. Eisingerich, Omar Merlo, Guan Lee
This study examines how different stakeholders perceive influencer authenticity, revealing the misalignments that arise when each group prioritizes different aspects of authenticity. In doing so, the authors generate new theory on influencer marketing and provide managerial insights for brands and agencies to collaborate effectively with influencers to resolve these misalignments and ultimately build and sustain influencer authenticity. Using exploratory, in-depth interviews with consumers, influencers, brand managers, and influencer marketing agencies, the study triangulates stakeholder perspectives on influencer authenticity. Specifically, it examines the misalignment among these groups through the lens of assemblage theory and explores how these misalignments may be resolved to produce successful and lasting influencer assemblages. Finally, it explores how influencer marketing agencies can help manage authenticity misalignments.
{"title":"EXPRESS: Authenticity in Influencer Marketing: How Can Influencers and Brands Work Together to Build and Maintain Influencer Authenticity?","authors":"Barbara Duffek, Andreas B. Eisingerich, Omar Merlo, Guan Lee","doi":"10.1177/00222429251319786","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429251319786","url":null,"abstract":"This study examines how different stakeholders perceive influencer authenticity, revealing the misalignments that arise when each group prioritizes different aspects of authenticity. In doing so, the authors generate new theory on influencer marketing and provide managerial insights for brands and agencies to collaborate effectively with influencers to resolve these misalignments and ultimately build and sustain influencer authenticity. Using exploratory, in-depth interviews with consumers, influencers, brand managers, and influencer marketing agencies, the study triangulates stakeholder perspectives on influencer authenticity. Specifically, it examines the misalignment among these groups through the lens of assemblage theory and explores how these misalignments may be resolved to produce successful and lasting influencer assemblages. Finally, it explores how influencer marketing agencies can help manage authenticity misalignments.","PeriodicalId":16152,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Marketing","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":12.9,"publicationDate":"2025-02-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143258474","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-02-06DOI: 10.1177/00222429251321370
Zheng Zhang, Wenjun Zhou, Michelle Andrews
Some review platforms display how long reviewers used a product alongside their review. The authors investigate whether doing so translates to more helpful reviews. Using online reviews of video games from a video game platform and leveraging its unique playtime tracking feature, they find the relationship between the amount of time playing a game before posting a review and the number of helpful votes the review receives follows a u-shape, where shorter and longer playtimes correspond to more votes, while intermediate times correspond to fewer votes. How displayed consumption time affects consumer expectations potentially explains this relationship. The less time reviewers spend consuming a product, the lower others’ expectations of review helpfulness may be and hence the more lenient their judgements. More consumption time may increase these expectations, but extensive consumption time could overcome this higher bar by signaling credibility. Moderation results related to reviewer experience signaling and review or product characteristics, as well as mediation results involving consumer-gifted review awards help support this context-based expectations account. These results are robust to conditioning out review, reviewer, and game level factors, sample matching, and other settings. The findings have implications for reducing the asymmetric information problem, managing expectations, and optimizing reviews.
{"title":"EXPRESS: Displaying the Amount of Consumption Time in Online Reviews Can Affect Helpful Votes","authors":"Zheng Zhang, Wenjun Zhou, Michelle Andrews","doi":"10.1177/00222429251321370","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429251321370","url":null,"abstract":"Some review platforms display how long reviewers used a product alongside their review. The authors investigate whether doing so translates to more helpful reviews. Using online reviews of video games from a video game platform and leveraging its unique playtime tracking feature, they find the relationship between the amount of time playing a game before posting a review and the number of helpful votes the review receives follows a u-shape, where shorter and longer playtimes correspond to more votes, while intermediate times correspond to fewer votes. How displayed consumption time affects consumer expectations potentially explains this relationship. The less time reviewers spend consuming a product, the lower others’ expectations of review helpfulness may be and hence the more lenient their judgements. More consumption time may increase these expectations, but extensive consumption time could overcome this higher bar by signaling credibility. Moderation results related to reviewer experience signaling and review or product characteristics, as well as mediation results involving consumer-gifted review awards help support this context-based expectations account. These results are robust to conditioning out review, reviewer, and game level factors, sample matching, and other settings. The findings have implications for reducing the asymmetric information problem, managing expectations, and optimizing reviews.","PeriodicalId":16152,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Marketing","volume":"62 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":12.9,"publicationDate":"2025-02-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143192488","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-02-06DOI: 10.1177/00222429251321417
Johannes Habel, Nathaniel N. Hartmann, Phillip Wiseman, Michael J. Ahearne, Shashank Vaid
Many business-to-business sales firms use automated lead nurturing (ALN) systems, which track leads’ online behavior and nurture them through personalized content. ALN software providers claim that ALN improves lead conversion, but whether this benefit materializes is unclear. Therefore, this research examines ALN’s effect across one qualitative and three quantitative studies. The findings indicate that ALN can provide valuable information to both sellers and leads and thereby improve the quality of salesperson–lead interactions, which in turn drives lead conversion. On average, ALN increases the probability of lead conversion between 0 (Studies 1, 3) and 23 (Study 2) percentage points. However, these effects strongly depend on a lead’s sales cycle length, expected sales volume, and preexisting relationship with the seller. Thereby, this article conducts the first rigorous “fact check” of ALN and provides evidence that understanding the effect of ALN requires a contingency view. The findings also call on practitioners to change their current practices related to ALN. Rather than accepting industry claims at face value, practitioners should verify whether ALN improves lead conversion in their specific context. Furthermore, they should employ ALN particularly for leads where information asymmetry persists and is unlikely to be resolved through other, more costly means.
{"title":"EXPRESS: Sales Pipeline Technology: Automated Lead Nurturing","authors":"Johannes Habel, Nathaniel N. Hartmann, Phillip Wiseman, Michael J. Ahearne, Shashank Vaid","doi":"10.1177/00222429251321417","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429251321417","url":null,"abstract":"Many business-to-business sales firms use automated lead nurturing (ALN) systems, which track leads’ online behavior and nurture them through personalized content. ALN software providers claim that ALN improves lead conversion, but whether this benefit materializes is unclear. Therefore, this research examines ALN’s effect across one qualitative and three quantitative studies. The findings indicate that ALN can provide valuable information to both sellers and leads and thereby improve the quality of salesperson–lead interactions, which in turn drives lead conversion. On average, ALN increases the probability of lead conversion between 0 (Studies 1, 3) and 23 (Study 2) percentage points. However, these effects strongly depend on a lead’s sales cycle length, expected sales volume, and preexisting relationship with the seller. Thereby, this article conducts the first rigorous “fact check” of ALN and provides evidence that understanding the effect of ALN requires a contingency view. The findings also call on practitioners to change their current practices related to ALN. Rather than accepting industry claims at face value, practitioners should verify whether ALN improves lead conversion in their specific context. Furthermore, they should employ ALN particularly for leads where information asymmetry persists and is unlikely to be resolved through other, more costly means.","PeriodicalId":16152,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Marketing","volume":"85 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":12.9,"publicationDate":"2025-02-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143258475","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-02-06DOI: 10.1177/00222429251320603
Jan Klostermann, Anne Mareike Flaswinkel, Chris Hydock, Reinhold Decker
Online word of mouth (WOM) is a critical driver of consumer purchases; however, relatively few researchers have sought to understand how a company’s characteristics might impact aggregate WOM valence (e.g., average star ratings of online reviews). The authors examine the effects of one such attribute—company size—and how it impacts WOM valence through individuals’ decisions regarding whether to engage in WOM. In four field studies, the authors find a negative relationship between company size and WOM that persists when controlling for the quality of consumers’ experience with the company. Subsequent experiments show that this effect occurs because consumers are more empathetic toward smaller companies. This empathy increases their desire to help smaller companies, which in turn increases the likelihood that they share WOM about a smaller company following a high-quality experience and decreases this likelihood in the case of a low-quality experience. Larger companies can mitigate the negative effect on aggregate WOM valence by responding frequently to WOM posts and employing language that evokes empathy—for example, by using emotional words, providing personalized responses, and addressing consumers by name.
{"title":"EXPRESS: The Effect of Company Size on Aggregate Word of Mouth Valence","authors":"Jan Klostermann, Anne Mareike Flaswinkel, Chris Hydock, Reinhold Decker","doi":"10.1177/00222429251320603","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429251320603","url":null,"abstract":"Online word of mouth (WOM) is a critical driver of consumer purchases; however, relatively few researchers have sought to understand how a company’s characteristics might impact aggregate WOM valence (e.g., average star ratings of online reviews). The authors examine the effects of one such attribute—company size—and how it impacts WOM valence through individuals’ decisions regarding whether to engage in WOM. In four field studies, the authors find a negative relationship between company size and WOM that persists when controlling for the quality of consumers’ experience with the company. Subsequent experiments show that this effect occurs because consumers are more empathetic toward smaller companies. This empathy increases their desire to help smaller companies, which in turn increases the likelihood that they share WOM about a smaller company following a high-quality experience and decreases this likelihood in the case of a low-quality experience. Larger companies can mitigate the negative effect on aggregate WOM valence by responding frequently to WOM posts and employing language that evokes empathy—for example, by using emotional words, providing personalized responses, and addressing consumers by name.","PeriodicalId":16152,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Marketing","volume":"40 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":12.9,"publicationDate":"2025-02-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143258476","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-02-04DOI: 10.1177/00222429241312127
Shrihari Sridhar
{"title":"Constructive Peer Review Made Practical: A Guide to the EMPATHY Framework","authors":"Shrihari Sridhar","doi":"10.1177/00222429241312127","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429241312127","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":16152,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Marketing","volume":"47 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":12.9,"publicationDate":"2025-02-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143083690","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-01-30DOI: 10.1177/00222429251319312
Laurel Anderson, Catharina von Koskull, Martin Mende, Johanna Gummerus
This research introduces a novel conceptualization of immersive service, defined as service that consumers are embedded in and surrounded by, in the sense that their life experience is within the service and, in great part, constructed by it for some period of time (e.g., hospital stays, residential care, air travel). The authors examine two key questions: How can characteristics of immersive service challenge consumer agency? How do consumers bolster their agency in immersive service? They study these questions through a novel theoretical lens (Figured Worlds Theory) and based on an ethnography in a residential care facility. The analyses unearth, define, and describe four conceptually novel characteristics of immersive service: encapsulation, positionality, multivocality and protocolization. These characteristics are crucial for marketers because, as the authors find, these structural aspects of immersive service can threaten consumer agency. The research also shows how consumers overcome challenges to agency. Specifically, consumers pursue five pathways toward their individual and collective agency: expanding the figured world, voicing, seeking task responsibility, challenging figured world protocols, and playing and imagining within the figured world. These findings break new conceptual ground for scholars, while also being relevant for managers, consistent with ideals of ‘Better Marketing for a Better World’.
{"title":"EXPRESS: Immersive Service: Characteristics, Challenges, and Pathways to Consumer Agency","authors":"Laurel Anderson, Catharina von Koskull, Martin Mende, Johanna Gummerus","doi":"10.1177/00222429251319312","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429251319312","url":null,"abstract":"This research introduces a novel conceptualization of immersive service, defined as service that consumers are embedded in and surrounded by, in the sense that their life experience is within the service and, in great part, constructed by it for some period of time (e.g., hospital stays, residential care, air travel). The authors examine two key questions: How can characteristics of immersive service challenge consumer agency? How do consumers bolster their agency in immersive service? They study these questions through a novel theoretical lens (Figured Worlds Theory) and based on an ethnography in a residential care facility. The analyses unearth, define, and describe four conceptually novel characteristics of immersive service: encapsulation, positionality, multivocality and protocolization. These characteristics are crucial for marketers because, as the authors find, these structural aspects of immersive service can threaten consumer agency. The research also shows how consumers overcome challenges to agency. Specifically, consumers pursue five pathways toward their individual and collective agency: expanding the figured world, voicing, seeking task responsibility, challenging figured world protocols, and playing and imagining within the figured world. These findings break new conceptual ground for scholars, while also being relevant for managers, consistent with ideals of ‘Better Marketing for a Better World’.","PeriodicalId":16152,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Marketing","volume":"24 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":12.9,"publicationDate":"2025-01-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143071867","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-01-13DOI: 10.1177/00222429251314385
Ye Hu
The author explores how racial alignment between film critics and movie casts affects critic ratings and their market implications. Testing the hypothesis of cultural affinity, this research finds that critics’ ratings tend to decrease as the proportion of Black cast members increases, but this effect is mitigated when the critic is Black. A text analysis of critics’ review excerpts suggests the presence of two tenets of cultural affinity: cultural literacy and cultural identity. An online survey further demonstrates that, in the absence of self-selection, Black respondents perceive greater affinity toward movies featuring predominantly Black casts and assign higher ratings to trailers featuring racially similar casts. Two additional analyses show that critic ratings have market consequences: as the proportion of Black cast members rises, critic ratings diverge more from audience choices (box office revenue) and audience ratings, though this effect is mitigated when the critics are Black. These findings underscore the importance of racial diversity in promoting culturally representative content in the marketplace.
{"title":"EXPRESS: Diversity Matters: How Film Critic Ratings Vary with Critic and Movie Cast Racial Profiles","authors":"Ye Hu","doi":"10.1177/00222429251314385","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429251314385","url":null,"abstract":"The author explores how racial alignment between film critics and movie casts affects critic ratings and their market implications. Testing the hypothesis of cultural affinity, this research finds that critics’ ratings tend to decrease as the proportion of Black cast members increases, but this effect is mitigated when the critic is Black. A text analysis of critics’ review excerpts suggests the presence of two tenets of cultural affinity: cultural literacy and cultural identity. An online survey further demonstrates that, in the absence of self-selection, Black respondents perceive greater affinity toward movies featuring predominantly Black casts and assign higher ratings to trailers featuring racially similar casts. Two additional analyses show that critic ratings have market consequences: as the proportion of Black cast members rises, critic ratings diverge more from audience choices (box office revenue) and audience ratings, though this effect is mitigated when the critics are Black. These findings underscore the importance of racial diversity in promoting culturally representative content in the marketplace.","PeriodicalId":16152,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Marketing","volume":"51 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":12.9,"publicationDate":"2025-01-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142974561","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-01-13DOI: 10.1177/00222429251314491
Stephanie Tully, Chiara Longoni, Gil Appel
As artificial intelligence (AI) transforms society, understanding factors that influence AI receptivity is increasingly important. The current research investigates which types of consumers have greater AI receptivity. Contrary to expectations revealed in four surveys, cross country data and six additional studies find that people with lower AI literacy are typically more receptive to AI. This lower literacy-greater receptivity link is not explained by differences in perceptions of AI’s capability, ethicality, or feared impact on humanity. Instead, this link occurs because people with lower AI literacy are more likely to perceive AI as magical and experience feelings of awe in the face of AI’s execution of tasks that seem to require uniquely human attributes. In line with this theorizing, the lower literacy-higher receptivity link is mediated by perceptions of AI as magical and is moderated among tasks not assumed to require distinctly human attributes. These findings suggest that companies may benefit from shifting their marketing efforts and product development towards consumers with lower AI literacy. Additionally, efforts to demystify AI may inadvertently reduce its appeal, indicating that maintaining an aura of magic around AI could be beneficial for adoption.
{"title":"EXPRESS: Lower Artificial Intelligence Literacy Predicts Greater AI Receptivity","authors":"Stephanie Tully, Chiara Longoni, Gil Appel","doi":"10.1177/00222429251314491","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429251314491","url":null,"abstract":"As artificial intelligence (AI) transforms society, understanding factors that influence AI receptivity is increasingly important. The current research investigates which types of consumers have greater AI receptivity. Contrary to expectations revealed in four surveys, cross country data and six additional studies find that people with lower AI literacy are typically more receptive to AI. This lower literacy-greater receptivity link is not explained by differences in perceptions of AI’s capability, ethicality, or feared impact on humanity. Instead, this link occurs because people with lower AI literacy are more likely to perceive AI as magical and experience feelings of awe in the face of AI’s execution of tasks that seem to require uniquely human attributes. In line with this theorizing, the lower literacy-higher receptivity link is mediated by perceptions of AI as magical and is moderated among tasks not assumed to require distinctly human attributes. These findings suggest that companies may benefit from shifting their marketing efforts and product development towards consumers with lower AI literacy. Additionally, efforts to demystify AI may inadvertently reduce its appeal, indicating that maintaining an aura of magic around AI could be beneficial for adoption.","PeriodicalId":16152,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Marketing","volume":"17 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":12.9,"publicationDate":"2025-01-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142974562","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-01-13DOI: 10.1177/00222429251315088
Christian Hotz-Behofsits, Nils Wlömert, Nadia Abou Nabout
Emotions are central to consumer communications, and extracting them from user-generated online content is crucial for marketers, considering that such consumer opinions significantly shape brand perceptions, influence purchase decisions, and provide essential insights for marketing analytics. To leverage vast user-generated data, marketers and researchers require advanced text-to-emotion converters. However, existing tools for fine-grained emotion extraction face several limitations: Lexica are constrained by their dictionaries, machine learning models by human-annotated training data, and large language models by insufficient validation. As a result, marketing research still tends to rely on mere sentiment detection instead of extracting more nuanced emotions from text. This paper introduces Nade (Natural Affect DEtection), a novel text-to-emoji-to-emotion converter that first “emojifies” language and then converts these emojis into intensity measures of well-established, theory-grounded emotions. This approach addresses the limitations of existing tools by leveraging the inherent emotional information in emojis. Using human raters and state-of-the-art converters as benchmarks, the authors establish the benefits of exploiting emojis, validate Nade, and demonstrate its use in several marketing applications using data from various social media platforms. Users can apply the proposed converter through an easy-to-use online app and programming packages for Python and R.
{"title":"EXPRESS: Natural Affect DEtection (NADE): Using Emojis to Infer Emotions from Text","authors":"Christian Hotz-Behofsits, Nils Wlömert, Nadia Abou Nabout","doi":"10.1177/00222429251315088","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429251315088","url":null,"abstract":"Emotions are central to consumer communications, and extracting them from user-generated online content is crucial for marketers, considering that such consumer opinions significantly shape brand perceptions, influence purchase decisions, and provide essential insights for marketing analytics. To leverage vast user-generated data, marketers and researchers require advanced text-to-emotion converters. However, existing tools for fine-grained emotion extraction face several limitations: Lexica are constrained by their dictionaries, machine learning models by human-annotated training data, and large language models by insufficient validation. As a result, marketing research still tends to rely on mere sentiment detection instead of extracting more nuanced emotions from text. This paper introduces Nade (Natural Affect DEtection), a novel text-to-emoji-to-emotion converter that first “emojifies” language and then converts these emojis into intensity measures of well-established, theory-grounded emotions. This approach addresses the limitations of existing tools by leveraging the inherent emotional information in emojis. Using human raters and state-of-the-art converters as benchmarks, the authors establish the benefits of exploiting emojis, validate Nade, and demonstrate its use in several marketing applications using data from various social media platforms. Users can apply the proposed converter through an easy-to-use online app and programming packages for Python and R.","PeriodicalId":16152,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Marketing","volume":"43 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":12.9,"publicationDate":"2025-01-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142974583","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-12-11DOI: 10.1177/00222429241307608
Shan Huang, Song Lin
One advantage of advertising on social media is leveraging users’ expression of “likes” to influence the perceptions and responses of others in their network. Through a largescale field experiment on WeChat, three online lab studies and a theoretical model, we explore whether and how displaying more “likes” in an ad can effectively lead to more ad “likes” and clicks. We find that displaying the first “like” can significantly increase users’ tendencies to both “like” and click on an ad. However, on average, showing additional “likes” does not further increase the clicking propensity, although it consistently attracts more “likes.” We further find that displaying more “likes” increases the clickthrough rate for lesser-known brands but not for well-known brands, and has a stronger impact on the “like” rate for more socially engaged users than for less socially engaged ones. These findings are consistent with the interplay between informational and normative social influences in social advertising. The public visibility of “likes” makes liking more susceptible to normative social influence than clicking. The coexistence of these two forces can lead to an enhanced conformity effect on liking and a crowding-out effect on clicking. Our findings offer novel implications for managing social advertising and designing social media platforms.
{"title":"EXPRESS: Do More “Likes” Lead to More Clicks? Evidence from a Field Experiment on Social Advertising","authors":"Shan Huang, Song Lin","doi":"10.1177/00222429241307608","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429241307608","url":null,"abstract":"One advantage of advertising on social media is leveraging users’ expression of “likes” to influence the perceptions and responses of others in their network. Through a largescale field experiment on WeChat, three online lab studies and a theoretical model, we explore whether and how displaying more “likes” in an ad can effectively lead to more ad “likes” and clicks. We find that displaying the first “like” can significantly increase users’ tendencies to both “like” and click on an ad. However, on average, showing additional “likes” does not further increase the clicking propensity, although it consistently attracts more “likes.” We further find that displaying more “likes” increases the clickthrough rate for lesser-known brands but not for well-known brands, and has a stronger impact on the “like” rate for more socially engaged users than for less socially engaged ones. These findings are consistent with the interplay between informational and normative social influences in social advertising. The public visibility of “likes” makes liking more susceptible to normative social influence than clicking. The coexistence of these two forces can lead to an enhanced conformity effect on liking and a crowding-out effect on clicking. Our findings offer novel implications for managing social advertising and designing social media platforms.","PeriodicalId":16152,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Marketing","volume":"5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":12.9,"publicationDate":"2024-12-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142810050","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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