Brand as a cognitive mediator: investigating the effect of media brands as a structural feature of textual news messages

Abstract

This study investigates how media brand knowledge, defined as a structural feature of the message, influences emotional and attentional responses to, and memory of, news messages. Design/methodology/approach Self-reports, facial electromyography (EMG) and electroencephalography (EEG) were used as indices of emotional valence, arousal and attention in response to 42 news messages, which varied along the valence and involvement dimensions, and were framed with different media brands varying along the familiarity and credibility dimensions. Findings Compared to the no-brand condition, news framed with brands elicited more attention. The memory tests indicated that strong media brands override the effect of involvement in information encoding, whereas details of news presented with Facebook were not well encoded. However, the headlines of news framed with Facebook were well retrieved. In addition, negative and high-involvement news elicited higher arousal ratings and corrugator EMG activity. News framed with familiar and high-credibility brands elicited higher arousal ratings. BRAND AS A COGNITIVE MEDIATOR 2 Practical implications Relevant for both brand managers and audiences, the findings show that building credibility and familiarity both work as brand attributes to differentiate media brands and influence information processing. Originality/value The results highlight the importance of media brands in news reading: as a structural feature, the brand is used as a proxy to process the message content. The study contributes by investigating how the type of source influences the reception and encoding of the mediated information; by investigating the emotional effects of brands; and by confirming previous findings in media psychology literature.

Exploring lack of closure as a brand transgression

“…The emotional attachment to narrative brands prompts their audiences to engage in extensive co-creation behaviours and purchase tie-in products (Brown and Patterson, 2009). That said, the nature of the relationship between the narrative brand and the consumer is still being understood by researchers (Laaksonen et al, 2019). As the endings of narrative brands can strongly affect the audiences' overall evaluations of them (Mumford, 1994), they have been the subject of prior research (Brown et al, 2003;Russell and Schau, 2014).…”

“…Despite this recognition, research into media brands is still developing (Siegert et al, 2015) and has thus far focused on investigating seminal concepts such as brand equity (Malmelin and Moisander, 2014) and brand personality (Kim, 2018). Therefore, further research into narrative brands using more diverse branding concepts such as brand transgressions would benefit the fields of media management and brand management (Malmelin and Moisander, 2014), and result in greater understandings about consumers of both narrative and media brands (Laaksonen et al, 2019). Previous research that has investigated audiences' responses to the ending of a favourite television series narrative brand has focused on ones that had definitive endings (Brown et al, 2003;Russell and Schau, 2014) such as The Sopranos and All My Children.…”

The Prospects of Using EEG in Tourism and Hospitality Research

“…More recent research has set out to explore various theories/concepts in one study. For example, Laaksonen et al (2019) evaluated the effects of media brand knowledge on not only consumers' emotional and attentional responses to but also their memory of news messages.…”

“…The third type of mixed approach refers to the use of EEG, other psychophysiological sensors and traditional self-report methods (e.g., Clark et al, 2018;Laaksonen et al, 2019). Boshoff's (2017), for example, used both neurophysiological measures (EEG and Galvanic Skin Response) to measure subconscious responses and a traditional pencil-and-paper experiment to measure conscious responses to the attractiveness of frontline employees in a service failure and recovery situation.…”

Editorial: New Forms of Media Work and Its Organizational and Institutional Conditions

“…The inclusion of social media in media work (Nielsen & Ganter, 2018) and other platform-centric practices are occurring in response to the new, digitalized media environment. The increasing competition is pushing media organizations to con-sider engaging in strategic communication and branding activities (e.g., Laaksonen et al, 2019;Malmelin & Moisander, 2014).…”