The Impact of Brand Positioning and Information on Emotional and Behavioral Participation of Social Media

Abstract

The present study attempts to transform brand positioning, using the example of nonprofit museums, to understand and explain how well-known museums around the world use social media to engage in global or local community communication, and how they use information to encourage user participation or interaction. The present study explores the dimensions of user participation and information cues for museums in order to highlight information issues in social media strategies. When the positioning of content and users' perceptions are different, this may produce negative emotional and behavioral effects. Design/methodology/approach -The study looks at the social media pages of the British Museum (United Kingdom), Musee du Louvre (France), and the National Palace Museum (Taiwan), three globally renowned museums but with very different positionings. A total of 3,591 posts were crawled between June 1, 2016, and January 31, 2018, in order to examine how these cultural brands create social media relations and understand how differences between global and local positionings may generate different user perceptions. This study is distinct from brand research for other types of business, instead focusing on the social media activities of nonprofit museums and gathering the contents of posts and data on user behavior and emotions. It compares three museums with different user positionings in order to understand how global positioning and local positioning on social media can achieve successful relationship marketing with users. This study applies an easy-to-understand behavioral model to explore the relationship between information, user emotions, and user behaviors.