The Social Media is the Message. Three Essays on Brand Communication and Consumer Engagement in Social Media

Despite social media being one of the most emblematic technological ecosystems of our age, various conceptual, methodological as well as empirical questions about its potentialities for brands remain unanswered, prompting the need to further investigate the evolving landscape of brand communication in such ecosystem. This research focuses on brand communication in social media and on its ability to elicit consumer engagement, and contributes to fill gaps at the societal, brand-consumer relationship, and platform level. The first essay, grounded on the tenets of institutional logics perspective, examines how rhetorical appeals adopted by brands have evolved on Twitter during a “black swan” crisis like the covid-19 pandemic. Our findings outline that, during the lockdown, not only brands resorted to emotive appeals characterized by intense ethical and social overtones, but also consumers prized this strategy. The second essay, bridging language expectancy theory and the brands as intentional agents framework, investigates both the volume and semantic virality patterns of traditional and woke communication cues brands adopt on social media platforms. Our findings suggest that woke communication cues generate higher levels of consumer engagement compared to traditional cues, especially when initiated by warm brands. When competent brands undertake woke campaigns, they tend to trigger more polarized consumer reactions instead. The third essay, acknowledging the lack of strategic and academic guidance about how to prevent and handle affiliate frauds, provides an original taxonomy of non-influencer and influencer falsity, describing the costs that various techniques cause and outlining the best strategies to preserve brands’ economic and reputational integrity. It also proposes a two-stage affiliate listening protocol, tested on real influencer affiliate data, offering several insights to marketers who need to manage their brands in an era of falsity. Overall, the three essays contained in this research provide theoretical, managerial, as well as methodological contributions to the field.