Consumer Active Reaction to Brands Taking a Stand on Public Issues on Twitter

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Social media has been in the eye of all scale brands in recent years more profoundly than ever before. Social media have not only become a platform to communicate with customers, but also a place to express brands’ personalities and speak up on important matters. While more brands have been openly taking a stand on public issues online, consumers have started to define their purchase choices based on the agreement with the brand’s stand. 37% of consumers expressed their willingness to recommend a brand to friends and family when they agree with the brand’s stand ("#BrandsGetReal: Brands Creating Change in the Conscious Consumer Era", 2020). Twitter is a popular platform for the research of social media reactions, as well as specific practices such a political campaigns or social activism. Over the last year, the world has faced several global issues that everyone has been actively discussing. As a result, #COVID19 and #BlackLivesMatter have become the two most often mentioned hashtags on Twitter ("Spending 2020 Together on Twitter", 2020). With the growing interest in sustainability, topics around the need for responsible packaging and tweets combating climate change have seen significant growth (+110% and +32% respectively) ("One Planet", 2021). The research objective of this study is to explore the effect of public issue post on consumer active reaction on brands’ official Twitter pages. Specifically, consumer active reaction is examined through the Twitter engagement metrics - retweets, quotes, and replies – and through the new variable proposed in this study - after social search behavior. Public issue post is first examined through the constructed Public Issue Post Index based on ESG criteria and urgency of the issue. Then, a comparative analysis of public issue posts vs. non-public issue posts is provided. The effect of brand activeness, i.e. brand social activity on Twitter, and media type are included in the analysis. The data is based on tweets from official sportswear brand pages crawled from Twitter in the period of 6 months in 2020. The results of the two models verified that the higher the public issue index of a post, the more active will be the reactions of consumers. The effect for public issue post index was found to be stronger for public issue posts in comparison to other general posts. Additionally, brand activeness and media type inclusion in a tweet were explored. Tweeting more on social issues (brand activeness) proved to have a positive effect on the number of retweets and quotes in all posts on Twitter, but in public issue posts, brand activeness reversely led to the negative outcome. Therefore, taking a stand on public issues on Twitter is favorable for the consumer active engagement in brands' interactions on Twitter, but posting too much or posting only on public issues disregarding other types of entertaining content might be damaging for a brand. The current research contributes to the existing literature and managerial practice from several perspectives. It introduces a measure to evaluate public issue posts with the use of commonly applied in corporate field ESG criteria. It utilizes the urgency of the issue metric to distinguish the hot topics from general posts. A way to measure after social search behavior is proposed in relation to the brand engagement on Twitter. Moreover, the comparisons between public issue posts vs. other non-public posts are made. The research views brand activeness with the regard to the public issue rather than general Twitter activity. It also provides an analysis of the media type to be included in the tweets.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• Extended Abstract
• References