Exciting on Facebook or competent in the newspaper? Media effects on consumers’ perceptions of brands in the fashion category

Abstract

Media investments are continuously shifting from traditional media like newspapers to digital alternatives like websites and social media. This study investigated if and how media choice between the two rival channels can influence consumers' perceptions of a novel brand. 504 Swedish retail fashion customers participated in an experiment to evaluate the identical advertisement placed either in a national newspaper or on Facebook. The results revealed that advertising in a newspaper can have a positive effect on brand equity facets and purchase intention through brand personality perceptions of being competent, while advertising on Facebook have similar effects but through perceptions of being exciting. Besides some evidence that choice between traditional and new media affects brand personality this study is one of the first attempts to incorporate media channel choice into the broader customer-based brand equity framework. The results from this particular study suggest that media channel choice should be considered from a brand equity building perspective at least in the fashion category. This study shows that different media channels could complement each other strategically, as traditional media channels still can have valuable and unique contributions to brand building through brand personality perceptions, especially for brands striving to be perceived as competent.

Consumers’ brand personality perceptions in a digital world: A systematic literature review and research agenda

“…Through the analysis of digital user‐generated content, some studies have provided evidence that consumers naturally use human personality characteristics and traits to refer to brands (Paschen et al., 2017; Ranfagni et al., 2016). By applying the premises and models of BP theory to digital settings, other studies have further confirmed that BP perceptions positively affect consumer responses, such as customer satisfaction (Ong et al., 2017), brand attitude (Torres & Augusto, 2019), and brand equity (Anselmsson & Tunca, 2019).…”

“…Apart from the lack of variety of digital touchpoints, the in‐depth analysis of digital contexts further shows that research has mainly been conducted in a single digital context (e.g., Chang, 2012). Only eight articles (see Table 3) examined consumers’ BP perceptions at different types of digital touchpoints, for example, across websites and social media platforms (e.g., Eigenraam et al., 2021; Ranfagni et al., 2016), or compared consumers’ BP perceptions that were drawn from an online context with those from an offline context (e.g., Anselmsson & Tunca, 2019; Chan et al., 2018). By contrast, the vast majority of studies opted to choose one digital touchpoint as representative for the digital environment (e.g., Ong et al., 2017).…”

“…First, the brand's choice of a channel or touchpoint is crucial since the media type itself can affect how its personality is perceived. Research on channel choice (5 articles) has demonstrated that brand messages in online or social media channels lead to higher perceptions of warmth and excitement, whereas the same brand messages elicit higher perceptions of competence if presented in an offline (print) medium (Anselmsson & Tunca, 2019; Chan et al., 2018). Likewise, several studies indicated that a brand's mere presence on social media platforms is sufficient to strengthen the overall BP perceptions of consumers (Peco‐Torres et al., 2021; Simiyu et al., 2020; Walsh et al., 2013).…”

Knowledge acquisition efficiency, strategic renewal frequency and firm performance in high velocity environments

“…In addition, consumer reviews on social media are forcing fashion retailers to produce the products the market wants now. In fact, recent research found that Facebook, a social media platform, influences purchasing intentions through perceptions of the brand as being exciting (Anselmsson and Tunca, 2019). Moreover, influencers , those virtual stars with many virtual followers, are driving fashion retailers to stock the products they recommend in real time.…”

Pandemic pains to Instagram gains! COVID-19 perceptions effects on behaviours towards fashion brands on Instagram in Sub-Saharan Africa: Tech-native vs non-native generations

“…Online word of mouth recommendations have been evidenced by previous research (e.g., Roy, Datta, and Mukherjee 2019) to have a strong influence on purchase intentions, hence actual buys. Also, favourable user-generated content on social media contributes positively to brand equity and brand attitude (Schivinski and Dabrowski 2016), especially in the fashion industry where the choice of social media channels for marketing communications would be highly critical (Anselmsson and Tunca 2019). Therefore, targeting younger generations who are tech-native can be more effective if fashion brands supplement the content shared with a proper blend of entertaining elements like music, games, riddles, etc., which are already doable given the fast-growing set of rich-media features within the Instagram environment.…”