Abstract
The interactive nature of social media provides marketers with better opportunities to have direct conversations with consumers. It thus calls for more strategic management of consumer-brand relationship on social media. The current study focuses on personified brand characters’ Twitter accounts and its use in consumer-brand relationship. A content analysis was conducted to explore how the personified brand characters within two industries (insurance and food) maintained their relationships with consumers on Twitter. Five relationship maintenance strategies (positivity, openness, sharing tasks, social networking and assurance) and three message types (informational, socio-emotional, and instrumental) were examined. Results revealed that positivity and openness were adopted by most analyzed brand characters. Informational tweets were used the most, followed by socio-emotional tweets. The insurance industry adopted a higher portion of strategies of openness and sharing tasks as well as informational tweets; while the food industry adopted a higher portion of social networking strategy and socio-emotional tweets. In addition, positivity and assurance were positively correlated to socio-emotional tweets; while openness and social networking were positively correlated to informational tweets.
Highlights
The evolution and prevalence of social media as one of the most effective ways for branding has led to its fairly recent synonymous association with business marketing (Baghaturia & Johnson, 2014)
RQ1 asks what relational maintenance strategies are used by each personified brand Twitter account? A chi-square test discovered that Geico used positivity dominantly (χ^2 = 36.213, df = 1, p < .001), with 54 out of 61 tweets using positivity
This study demonstrates that brand personification can play a role on social media in the maintenance of consumer brand relationships
Summary
The evolution and prevalence of social media as one of the most effective ways for branding has led to its fairly recent synonymous association with business marketing (Baghaturia & Johnson, 2014). As social media serves as a supplementary marketing channel, brands can communicate as well as interact with their current and prospective customers (McCarthy, Rowley, Ashworth & Pioch, 2014). McCarthy et al (2014) note the literature support for social media as an avenue for brands to promote consumer relationships as well as build consumer communities. As a consequence of the rapid rise of social media, marketers consider how brand pages or even Twitter accounts can be leveraged to generate consumer engagement as well as enhance consumer-brand relationships (De Vries & Carlson, 2014). Brand personification as a social media marketing strategy has grown in popularity (Kent (2014). Research has revealed that fictional brand characters generate more social media buzz than celebrities. The increasing transfer of brand characters onto social media and the evolution of brands’ social media marketing strategies beg the question of how brand personified characters on social media are used to manage consumer-brand relationship
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