The branding process no longer revolves just around the main branding elements, such as naming, slogan, visual identity or positioning, but is rather a storytelling process promising customers the satisfaction of their needs, as well as an entirely new experience. Stories have a great persuasive force because our episodic memory stores them effortlessly and brings them back to us when we see or hear about the product again, unlike numbers and specific data (Wala 2015, p. 170). Therefore, products that tell stories are no longer foreign to consumers, since they know a great deal about them and products people associate with emotions and stories are called brands. The present paper offers an insight into this branding approach by combining theoretical considerations with numerous examples of brands which have already embraced this technique, with the aim of providing a better understanding of the process of storytelling in general and an assessment of its role, especially in relation to branding.

At the beginning of 2017 massive protests took place on the streets of the biggest cities in Romania, unprecedented in the post-Decembrist history of the country. They were caused by a decree passed by the government that was meant to decriminalize certain offences, including official misconduct. In situations such as social movements on a larger scale, the communication flow on social networking platforms, especially on Facebook, which is the most popular social media platform in Romania, increases exponentially (Tufekci & Wilson, 2012;Valenzuela, 2013). In this context, the present paper focuses on the analysis of the social media communication of the main political parties and their leaders. The communication strategy expressed especially on Facebook is interesting, because it is preferred by a large part of the protest participants (for information regarding Facebook groups of protesters see Adi & Lilleker, 2018). The central question of the present paper revolves around the way in which political parties and leaders communicated during the aforementioned protests. We have carried out a computer-assisted frequency analysis and have analyzed 15 Facebook accounts of the main political parties and their leaders during the period January 18 th -March 5 th 2017, which corresponds to the period of the protests.According to Facebrands.ro, a Romanian monitoring service of Facebook accounts nationwide 3 , in 2017, 50% of users were women and 50% were men. The top three age categories of users are the following: most of them are 25-34 years old (26.83%), followed by users aged 18-24 years old (21.47%) and 35-44 years old (21.15%). Other age groups are the following: 45-54 years old (12.63%), 13-17 years old (9.24%), followed by 55-64 years old (6.16%) and by users aged 65+ (2.53%). Most of them are married (68.04%), while only 22.6% of them are single, 8.2% are in a relationship and 1.09% are engaged. These number and figures show that this social networking platform reaches a significant proportion of Romanian Internet users, considering that almost half of all Romanian Internet users are present on Facebook and most of them are relatively young. This segment of the population that is present on social media is the same segment that represents the working force of the country directly affected by any political action or decision. For politicians, the fact that they can address this population segment directly through this communication tool should be perceived as an asset and should be fully used. Whether this is the case will be shown in the following chapters.We will focus on the created dialogue, or to be specific, on the use or lack of reactions and responses from the main political parties and leaders towards the issues. By using a computer-assisted analysis, we analyzed online materials published by the abovementioned country's representatives on their Facebook profiles during the period of the protests, in order to see how they acted and reacted during the protests, how active (number of posts) and how involve...

While the majority of research regarding product placement has been done in the context of film, TV productions, music videos and video games, we know little about this practice and its effects in the field of written text. The aim of the present paper is to gather all the relevant data about product placement used in books and e-books in order to set the grounds for further research on the matter. In the following pages we will provide some examples of texts in which product placement was used and we will present the revealing results of three studies which have been conducted regarding product placements in novels.

When social media influencers (SMIs) post sponsored content, it should be recognizable as such. However, there is no European Union-wide legislation governing sponsorship transparency, and monitoring practices differ significantly across member states. In Romania, where we conducted our study, such regulations are only just emerging, and there are weak monitoring policies regarding advertising disclosure on SMI branded posts. In this study, we examined how two different types of advertising disclosure commonly used on Instagram are likely to affect consumers’ behavioral outcomes, such as purchase intention and intention toward the SMI, mediated by the activation of conceptual persuasion knowledge (CPK), via negative affect and the trustworthiness of the SMI. We conducted a three-level between-subjects online experiment (N=248), manipulating the absence versus the presence of advertising, which came in one of two types, brand-unspecific (#ad, #sponsoredpost) and brand-specific (paid partnership with [brand]). Considering the mediation path via the trustworthiness of the SMI, findings suggest that the paid partnership disclosure had positive outcomes for purchase intention and intention toward the SMI.

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