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Smartphones have made sharing images of branded experiences nearly effortless. This research classifies social media brand imagery and studies user response. Aside from packshots (standalone product images), two types of brand-related selfie images appear online: consumer selfies (featuring brands and consumers' faces) and an emerging phenomenon we term brand selfies (invisible consumers holding a branded product). We use convolutional neural networks to identify these archetypes and train language models to infer social media response to more than a quarter million brand-image posts (185 brands on Twitter and Instagram). We find consumer-selfie images receive more sender engagement (i.e., likes and comments), whereas brand selfies result in more brand engagement, expressed by purchase intentions. These results cast doubt on whether conventional social media metrics are appropriate indicators of brand engagement. Results for display ads are consistent with this observation, with higher click-through rates for brand selfies than for consumer selfies. A controlled lab experiment suggests self-reference is driving the differential response to selfie images. Collectively, these results demonstrate how (interpretable) machine learning helps to extract marketing-relevant information from unstructured multimedia content and that selfie images are a matter of perspective in terms of actual brand engagement.

Cause-related marketing (CM), which links corporate donations to consumer purchases, has ongoing momentum in marketing. As the magnitude and direction of consumers’ CM response are inconclusive, this meta-analysis synthesizes evidence on main and moderator effects from 237 studies. On average, it finds a moderate effect for attitudinal (d=.458) and a weak effect for behavioral response (d=.283; both p <.001), both with high underlying heterogeneity. A multivariate meta-regression on CM moderators grounded along four conceptual pillars – transparency, signals of sincerity, purchase context, and consumers’ emotional attachment to CM – shows that attitudinal effects hinge mostly on emotional attachment. Suboptimal execution and poor communication of the donation appeal in particular can even have detrimental effects on attitudes. In addition, various moderators from other pillars play a relevant role. For behavioral outcomes, both emotional attachment and signals of sincerity are equally important. The visual prominence of the donation is the most relevant individual moderator, with only a few others related to the two pillars following with some distance. CM therefore requires different priorities depending on corporate objectives. The paper further compares CM effects to those of other marketing instruments, simulates practical examples and provides avenues for further research.