Can firms get away with questionable content marketing? : An explanatory research about questionable content marketing on social media and its relationship with brand image.

Sammanfattning: The development of social media has increased the usage and prevalence of content marketing. This have enhanced the pressures on marketers to manage and leverage this tool. Also, consumers interaction with valuable content leads to a stronger relationship with the brand which further might enhance the brand image. Hence, this paper carries out a quantitative research with the purpose to explain if questionable content marketing on social media have a negative impact on brand image. The researchers used questionnaires as their method for collection of empirical data. The respondents were gathered based on a convenience sampling. The questionnaires were out sent out to 204 participants, were the aim was to investigate if the respondents view of a brand changes negatively, after being exposed to scenarios that were constituted by questionable content marketing. It was analyzed through an ANOVA test. The overall conclusions after gathering and analyzing the data, implicate that questionable content marketing have a negative effect on brand image. Therefore, it becomes important for managers to carefully evaluate their content marketing strategy on social media in order to avoid questionable content marketing.