Content Marketing in Social Media - A study of the impact of brand type, message appeal and format on attitudes and intentions

Sammanfattning: Social media has fundamentally changed the premises of marketing by adding a two-way channel for communication to the marketing mix. Owned media and content marketing have moved from being buzzwords to playing an important communication role. The success of social media is based on providing valuable content to consumers, at a time when communication strategy is moving from 'push' to 'pull' approach. Therefore, thorough understanding of consumers' message preferences and effects in the emerging field of social media content marketing is essential. Our purpose is to explore the effects of three different message components on consumer attitudes towards content and brand, and on purchase intentions. These three components are product type (hedonic/utilitarian), message appeal (emotional/rational) and message format (visual/verbal). While previously studied in pairs, to our knowledge no previous study has conducted research on the effects of the three message components simultaneously. We also add the aspect of content marketing rather than advertising, and the setting of social networking sites to the experiment. Data from 420 respondents was collected and analyzed for the purposes of this quantitative study. We have found that the theories on existing relationships between message components and effects do not generally apply in the setting of social media content marketing. Instead, hedonic brands can achieve favorable attitudes and intentions by maintaining verbal content communication, regardless the appeal. At the same time, utilitarian brands can achieve favorable attitude toward the content by applying emotional appeal, and trigger increased purchase intention by using visual message format, particularly combined with the cognitive appeal. These findings have interesting implications for both theory and management in content marketing.