Driving Consumer Engagement in Social Media

Influencing Electronic Word of Mouth

Anna Bianchi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000294729
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

Summarizing the extant research on marketing communications, social media and word of mouth, this book clarifies terms often incorrectly and interchangeably used by scholars and marketers and provides principles of effective marketing communications in social media for different brand types and in different geographic markets.

Conversations among consumers on social media now have an unprecedented ability to shape attitudes toward people, products, services, brands and to influence buying decisions. Consequently, the digital era brings to the fore the importance of interpersonal relations and the power of personal recommendations. This book is the first to empirically investigate how the form and appeal of marketing communications in social networks influence electronic word of mouth, including an examination of brand type and geographic market. The author focuses on motivations and reveals why people exchange opinions about brands, products and services in the digital environment. The book summarizes the existing research on marketing communications, social media and word of mouth, provides a cutting-edge knowledge based on the analysis of the actual behavior of consumers and rules of effective marketing communications in social media.

This research-based book is written for scholars and researchers within the fields of marketing and communication. It may also be of interest to a wider audience interested in understanding how to use social media to influence electronic word of mouth.

1 Marketing communications in the digital age

All over the world there are countless publications on marketing communications. Books, articles, conference proceedings and websites explore its different features and provide suggestions on how to communicate effectively. Since the early years of the 21st century, academics, researchers and marketing practitioners have shown a growing interest in marketing communications on social media and eWOM. Among over 300 articles from academic journals reviewed for this study, over 80% were published within the last 15 years and, on average, every year the number of articles has grown by nearly 25%. Unfortunately, most publications on marketing communications, social media and WOM present the subjective opinions of authors, rather than reliable scientific evidence. The first three chapters of this book fill this gap by providing up-to-date and reliable findings of the most-cited empirical research. By presenting an overview of the extant academic literature, they enable a better understanding to be reached of what marketing communications, social media and WOM really are and why they are so important in today’s world. The overview moves from the macro level of marketing communications to the micro level of eWOM on social media.

Marketing communication is a dialogue between a company and its environment – current and potential customers and other stakeholders (Bajdak, 2013). This definition, as well as the origin of the term “communication” (from the Latin “communicare” – to share), emphasizes bilateralism, interaction, relationship and exchange, which constitute the essence of marketing communications and lay the foundations of social media.

This suggests that social media can be an ideal environment to pursue the goals of marketing communications (Batra & Keller, 2016):

• creating awareness and salience

• conveying detailed information

• creating imagery and personality

• building trust

• eliciting emotions

• inspiring action

• instilling loyalty

• connecting people (i.e., creating brand advocacy and WOM)

The last point is particularly important. While being one of its goals, WOM plays a fundamental role in marketing communications, a role that is not limited to product promotion.

As marketing communications and promotion are often used as synonyms, it is worth underlining the differences between the two terms. Promotion is a rather unidirectional influence of a company (Wiktor, 2002), related to the product and directed at consumers, while marketing communications is a broader term, a dialogue which includes all stakeholders (Kijewska & Mantura, 2017; Koniorczyk & Sztangret, 2000; Wiktor, 2013). For instance, marketing communications can be used to attract new employees or to motivate the current ones. WOM can contribute to a company’s image as a good employer. Marketing information deployment within market research is also regarded as marketing communications, but its purposes are cognitive (e.g., examining customers’ needs) rather than promotional (Kijewska & Mantura, 2017).

Marketing communications faces a crisis. Marketing communication expenditure and the number of advertising messages are constantly growing, thus leading to a constant decrease in advertising effectiveness and a constant increase in spending to make it effective (Godin, 1999; van den Putte, 2009). In a world full of advertisements, “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” (Simon, 1971, p. 40). As Godin (1999, p. 38) sums up: “The more they spend, the less it works. The less it works, the more they spend”. Prior research on advertising highlights a decline of trust (Godes et al., 2005) and negative attitudes toward advertising among consumers (Internet Standard, 2012; Szubra & Trojanowski, 2018; Taranko, 2018). People do not like and avoid advertisements. Therefore, one of the major challenges for marketers today is to find a new way to capture people’s attention and position a brand in the consumer’s mind (Kotler, 2012).

How can this major challenge highlighted by Kotler be addressed on the basis of existing theories in marketing and communication research? Uses and Gratifications (U&G) theory is deemed particularly relevant in this case for three main reasons. Firstly, it assumes the active role of consumers, who of their own volition decide to participate in the communication process. Secondly, its individual-centric perspective is consistent with the personal dimension of WOM. Thirdly, U&G theory is functionalist in its approach, and is thus likely to develop general guidelines and concrete problem-solving ideas applicable in marketing practice (Morgan, 1984), which is consistent with the purpose of this study from a practical perspective.

U&G theory has its origins in media effects research (McQuail, 1983). In the 1940s, the initial studies of communications developed an approach to examine the “gratifications” which attract and retain audiences to the specific media and content types that satisfy their psychological and social needs (Katz, Hass, & Gurevitch, 1973). Diverging from other media effect theories that examine “what do the media do to people”, the U&G approach is focused on “what do people do with the media”, thus providing an insight into functions served by a specific medium or content (Katz, 1959, p. 2). “The message of even the most potent of the media cannot ordinarily influence an individual who has no ‘use’ for it in the social and psychological context in which he lives” (Katz, 1959, p. 2). U&G researchers distinguish gratifications sought from gratifications obtained (outcomes), and media consumption is related to the discrepancy between the two (Palmgreen & Rayburn, 1979). The more the gratifications obtained correspond to the gratifications sought, the more people will continue the consumption of a medium. The assumptions of U&G theory include (Katz, Blumler, & Gurevitch, 1974; Ruggiero, 2000):

• active audiences with varying levels of activity and goal-directed media use

• media selection initiated by the audience members

• media competing with other sources that can satisfy the same need

• self-awareness of the audience members and their ability to articulate many of the goals of media use

• no value judgments about the cultural impact of mass communication; focus on how and why people use media

In sum, in order to find a new way to capture people’s attention – a new medium of marketing communications – we need to explore why people use media. Consistent with the essence of marketing, we need to look at people’s needs, we need to give them a reason to pay attention, and we need to give them a reason to listen. The prominence of consumers’ needs is a recurrent theme in this book and constitutes the core of the following sections and chapters.

Katz, Hass, and Gurevitch (1973) provide a list of psychological and social needs satisfied by exposure to mass media, which includes five categories of needs:

• cognitive (related to information, knowledge and understanding)

• personal integrative (strengthening proper credibility, confidence, stability, and status)

• affective (or hedonic; related to aesthetic, pleasurable and emotional experience)

• escape or tension release

• social integrative (keeping in contact with family, friends and other people)

Since 1990, the media have experienced a huge transformation; however the essential needs they satisfy have remained basically the same (Nambisan & Baron, 2007).

Hoffman and Novak (1996) explain this media transformation by showing the evolution from a traditional one-to-many marketing communications model for mass media and an interpersonal communication model in the computer-mediated environment to a new model of many-to-many marketing communications in a hypermedia computer-mediated environment where users co-create content. In the traditional model of marketing communications, communication content is transmitted from a firm to consumers through a medium. There is no interaction between consumers and firms. On the contrary, in the interpersonal and computer-mediated communication model, content is transmitted through a medium from one consumer to another but this model includes interaction, so through the medium the recipient provides feedback to the sender. This model is implicit in eWOM on social media. In the new model of marketing communications in a hypermedia computermediated environment, the content is hypermedia (i.e., combining text, images, audio and video with hypertext links) and the medium is a distributed computer network (Internet). In this model, interactivity can take place both with and through the medium. Therefore, this model can be viewed as a mix of the two previous models. Consumers and firms can interact with the medium (e.g., navigate the Internet), firms can provide content (e.g., on their websites) and transmit it to consumers, but consumers can also add product-related content to the medium. Additionally, because of such interaction, the sender is also the receiver. The primary relationship is not between the sender and the receiver, but rather with the “mediated environment” they interact with. Using this new model of marketing communications in a hypermedia computer-mediated environment, it would be interesting to explore how the content provided by the firm to the medium (on the Internet) influences the additional content consumers provide (eWOM). This issue is covered by the scope of this study (Figure 1.1).

One could argue that the Internet is merely another medium of marketing communication (like television, radio or newspapers); however, the interactive nature of the Internet creates an entirely new environment that changes the traditional parameters of mass communication.

The interactivity of the Internet strengthens the core U&G theory assumption of an active audience (Johnson & Kaye, 2003; Sundar & Limperos, 2013). “Participants in the communication process have control over and can exchange roles in their mutual discourse” (Williams, Rice, & Roge...