The effects of affective and cognitive elaborations from Facebook posts on consumer attitude formation

Abstract

This research investigates the effects of affect and cognition in consumers' information processing of branded content on Facebook pages. A model was suggested to delve into the elaboration process leading to consumer attitude formation. A 2 (purchase-decision involvement: low versus high) × 2 (product categories: hedonic versus utilitarian) × 2 (sources of Facebook posts: brand posts versus consumer posts) between-subjects experiment was conducted online. The validated model demonstrates the main effects that affective elaboration significantly supersedes cognitive elaboration in forming attitudes toward the posts and attitudes toward the brand. Post hoc analyses show further evidence of the interaction effects that affective elaboration is the dominant influencer when consumers process brand-related information in Facebook posts across situations. Theoretical implications for future research and managerial suggestions for social media marketing are discussed.

Developing effective social media messages: Insights from an exploratory study of industry experts

“…Correlative terms analogous to SM messages include brand messages (Rapp et al, ), web advertising (Brackett & Carr, ; Ducoffe, ), microblogging word of mouth messages (Hennig‐Thurau, Wiertz, & Feldhaus, ), SM advertising (Jung, ), and SMM (Ashley & Tuten, ; Chang et al, ). To gain success, a brand's SMM approach needs to generate robust feelings among users (Chen, Kim, & Lin, ). Among other marketing methods, this requires producing bright and communicative promotional messages by placing them visibly on media platforms (Chang et al, ).…”

Consumers' attitude toward Facebook advertising

“…Irritation reduces the effectiveness of advertising content and tends to generate a negative attitude towards the ad (Ducoffe, 1995). Consumers' attitudes toward brand posts determine their overall brand evaluations and their attitudes toward the brand (Chen et al, 2015).…”

Three Essays on Understanding Consumer Engagement with Brand Posts on Social Media

“…Research on emotional contagion in CMC found that emotional face-to-face communications and CMC are very similar, and, probably the only difference is that there are more frequent and explicit emotion expressions in CMC than face-to-face communications (Derks, Fischer, & Bos, 2008). For example, in social media contexts, when consumers are exposed to positive messages, emotional contagion can take place and lead them to experience the same positive emotions (Chen, Kim, & Lin, 2015;Kramer, Guillory, & Hancock, 2014). Besides, previous research has shown that, in CMC, emotionally-charged messages (e.g., using emotional words) can trigger more cognitive involvement (e.g., attention) (Bayer, Sommer, & Schacht, 2012;Kissler, Herbert, Peyk, & Junghofer, 2007;Smith & Petty, 1996) and higher psychological arousal (Berger, 2011;Berger & Milkman, 2012), which, in turn, can impact the message receivers' feedback and reciprocity Huffaker, 2010;, participation , and social sharing behavior (Heath, 1996;Luminet IV, Bouts, Delie, Manstead, & Rimé , 2000;Peters, Kashima, & Clark, 2009;Rimé , 2009;Kim & Johnson, 2016).…”

“…It allows requesters to access human intelligence in a simple, scalable, and cost-effective way. Previous research has suggested that MTurk can provide more demographically diverse samples than traditional convenience samples (e.g., student samples, standard Internet samples) (Berinsky et al, 2012;Buhrmester et al, 2011), thus, is a viable alternative for conducting online experiments (Chen, Kim, & Lin, 2015;Paolacci et al, 2010). To ensure the data quality, in line with previous research (e.g., Barcelos et al, 2018;Lee et al, 2018;Peer et al, 2014), we restricted participants to MTurk workers with high reputation (above 95% task-approval rates, minimum 500 completed HITs).…”