Media 6: Annotated Bibliography

Murray, S. (2005). Brand loyalties: rethinking content within global corporate media. Media, Culture & Society, 27(3), pp.415-435.

Rohm, A., Gao, T., Sultan, F. and Pagani, M. (2012). Brand in the hand: A cross-market investigation of consumer acceptance of mobile marketing. Business Horizons, 55(5), pp.485-493.

Chi, H. (2011). Interactive Digital Advertising vs. Virtual Brand Community. Journal of Interactive Advertising, 12(1), pp.44-61.

Hsu-Hsien Chi’s article aims to explore consumer responses to social media marketing, particularly examining the effects of interactive digital advertising (exposing users to brand-related messages) and virtual brand communities (engaging them in brand-related social relations), using Taiwanese college students and Facebook as the study setting. Interestingly, Chi’s study also examined the various motivations that drive social media users to their various platforms, highlighting a desire for ‘social capital’ and bonding, as well as the positive influences on psychological well-being that these intangibles offer.

The study found that, by and large, social media users preferred virtual brand communities to digital advertising, finding them more trustworthy, and less irritating. Chi suggests that these communities fulfil users’ needs for social gratification, as well as boosting their psychological well-being. Chi also emphasises the two-way communication benefits that virtual brand communities offer, as opposed to digital advertising methods. However, the author notes that the sample group used for the study was overwhelmingly made up of female consumers, creating the potential for sample bias – something to note for our group’s research into cross-platform marketing. Chi’s article is particularly helpful due to its emphasis on ‘new media’ marketing and its effects on the consumer. The study’s use of Facebook also enables our group to judge the platform’s merits, particularly in the realm of virtual brand communities – the advantages they offer over other, traditional forms of marketing. This should aid us in the construction of our own media artefact, as we’ll no doubt need to draw upon Facebook in the course of our implementation.

Pentina, I., Zhang, L. and Basmanova, O. (2013). Antecedents and consequences of trust in a social media brand: A cross-cultural study of Twitter. Computers in Human Behavior, 29(4), pp.1546-1555.

Pentina, Zhang and Basmanova’s article intends to examine the ‘brand relationship theory’ through the context of the social media platform Twitter, positing that by ‘acting as identity-expressing symbols”, brands position themselves as ‘social relationship partners’ online. The study found that brand trust ‘in the context of social media’ is a vital part of online marketing. Interestingly, the study found varied cross-cultural results when examining whether trust in the particular platform (i.e. Twitter) carried towards hosted brands. While Ukrainian sample users positively correlated this trust, American Twitter users did not, suggesting that companies would benefit from ‘implementing different relationship building strategies in different cultures.’ The authors go on emphasize the power of ‘engagement techniques’, noting that ‘64% of Twitter users are more likely to make a purchase from a brand that answers their tweeted questions.’ The article also highlights some interesting observations on consumers’ relationships with brand ‘pages’, asserting that “67% of Twitter users who become followers of a brand report buying that brand’s products,” among other facts.

A further interesting insight from the study was the finding that social media pages could ‘attune their brand identities to those of their participants’ in order to engage them more successfully. This observation is of particular use for our research group, given that we’re investigating the effects and uses of cross-platform marketing in new media. Ultimately the article is a useful examination of how trust can shape a consumer’s online experience, and provides a variety of methods for companies/advertisers to engage social media users directly, and win their trust and patronage.