The significance of maximizing a brand's presence on social media has come to light as a result of the sudden rise in social media users. Branded content on social media is used by marketers to complement their marketing strategies and improve consumers' perceptions of their brands as they embrace innovations and technologies in the marketing sectors. Of all the active social media sites in the contemporary market, Facebook is the most dominant and attracts more users than others like Instagram and Pinterest and this has caused many marketers to utilize it in advertising their goods and services. Though the practice of alluring customers using the social media is promising, some of the topics are understudied especially those related to the consumer mechanisms of processing information related to brands in the social media posts. Previous studies on the formation of consumer attitudes after exposure to old-style advertising tactics such as television commercials. Despite numerous researches on consumer attitudinal formations and social media brand-related information, a few studies focus on the construction of summer attitudes in the realm of social media. The research paper explores the effects of affective and cognitive elaborations from the Facebook posts on attitude formation by the consumers. A model was recommended to investigate the elaboration process that led to consumer attitude formation. The results indicated that affective elaboration significantly influenced the attitude formation towards posts and brands than cognitive elaboration. The study also discusses the theoretical implications for future research along with the managerial suggestions for marketing on the social media.
Critical Review of a Journal Article
Introduction
The journal article that needs to be critically reviewed is The Effects of Affective and Cognitive Elaborations from Facebook Posts on Consumer Attitude Formation by Kuan-Ju Chen, Jooyoung Kim, and Jhih-Syuan Lin. It is a research paper that explains how consumer attitudes towards a particular brand are formed by processing information of branded content on the Facebook pages.
Results
The authors managed to present clear and consistent results. In the first section of the results, the article describes that a PDI scale was adopted in verifying the appropriateness of the low PDI and high PDI manipulation. It is evident on what constituted the level when it says that the scale had four items and was measured on a 7 point Likert scale. The authors further explain the questions that the consumers were responding to on the scale. Firstly, the consumers were to respond on how much they would care about the brands they buy while selecting from the different brands of a given product in the market. Secondly, the consumers were supposed to give their view of the degree in which the different brands vary. Besides, they were to respond to how significant it is to them to make the right choice of the product. Finally, consumers were supposed to meet on the scale how much they would be concerned about the outcome of the selection of product they make. The authors explain that the t-test was used to analyse the participants in the low-PDI condition, as well as the participants in the high-PDI condition and even, went ahead to give the variance.
The article uses a diagram of a path coefficients to elaborate on the structural model that was used to test the hypothesis. The aim of the path analysis was to determine the overall relationship. At this point, the article was not clear on the overall relationships being determined by the path analysis. It would have been better if the article highlighted the relationships. A table is also used to display the estimates of the main effects and is coherent in the analysis of the results though it would have been better if it was organized appropriately. The relationship between the variables is not clear enough. However, the results were consistent because they reflect the proposed model in Hypothesis and Research Question section of the article.
In testing the hypotheses, the authors used data that was sub-divide into six subsets which were distinguished by PDI levels, the categories of the products along with sources of Facebook posts. For the PDI, they used high contrasted with law, brand versus consumer for the sources of Facebook posts and hedonic contrasted with utilitarian for the product categories. Further, to compare the effects of affective and cognitive elaborations on attitudes towards posts as the direct effects and the attitude towards the brand as the indirect effects, the authors performed regular tests using the bootstrap procedure. The first hypothesis was that affective elaboration would have more influence on attitudes than the cognitive explanation for the valuation of low-PDI products. However, there were significant differences in the estimates making the affective elaboration to have more direct effects than the cognitive elaboration on attitudes towards the posts. The findings supported the first hypothesis though there were some gaps in the data. The second hypothesis was that cognitive explanation would have significant effects on the evaluation of products with high PDI than the affective elaboration. However, contradicting results were found after testing the hypothesis. The findings indicated that direct effects of affective elaboration were significant concerning the attitudes towards the posts. Contrarily, the direct effects of cognitive elaboration were insignificant. Despite the contradictions, the results reflected the article’s proposed hypothesis.
The division of the data into several sub-sets was necessary to test the main effects coherently. However, some results were contradictory, some of them indicated a significant direct effect of affective elaboration yet the immediate impact of the cognitive explanation was not significant. The test used in the article is ineffective to some extent though a large percentage of the information is reliable. The gaps in data collection resulted in a significant difference in the estimates which could have been avoided if the gaps had been bridged. Sufficient details are provided, and the results give a detailed analysis of the relationships. The article divided the data into several subsets based on the experimental designs that involve low PDI, high-PDI hedonic or the functional products along with either the brand post or the consumer post.
Discussion
In the literature review, the article shows that the marketers have embraced the branded contents found in the social media to increase their marketing strategies and promote the consumer experience in the brands. The branded content can be presented in text messages that use the format of advertisement to promote the brands on social media. Facebook being the dominant social network platform attracts many users, and it is the most representative platform among the social Medias that are active in the market. Therefore, marketers should utilize the Facebook posts that are brand-related to reach many customers along with prospects to stimulate their purchasing behaviours, increase brand loyalty and the engagement of consumers. However, topics on consumer mechanism on processing information that is brand-related in the social media posts and making judgments that are attitudinal remain understudied. Research carried out in the consumer behaviour literature has revealed the formation of attitude shows that the consumers form opinions after being exposed to traditional advertising tactics that include product trails, print advertisements, and TV commercials. Empirical research on social media has examined the motivation of consumers to consume as well as generate posts that are brand-related in the social platform. Nonetheless, research on the construction of the summer attitudes in the realm of social media especially Facebook is minimal. Facebook posts and advertisement messages are different in many ways. The ads are solely created by the marketers while the Facebook pages are produced by both the marketers and consumers. As opposed to ads, the users are more exposed to brand-related Facebook posts since they often visit the pages.
According to research, elaboration describes the number of inferences that are elicited immediately in the working memory by the given messages. Traditional views specify two major dimensions specific to information processing by consumers that include affect and cognition as the basis for the evaluation of the attitudes. The elicited affect and cognition are comprehended as cognitive and affective elaborations that act as in-process outputs in determining attitudes. Some scholars claim that cognitive explanation plays a significant role in reaction formation while others argue that attitudes are primarily influenced by affective elaboration. The ability of social media to significantly transform the management of brand presence online and the consumers who need the shared content to learn about brands calls for sustained attention on the cognitive and the affective elaborations. The study aims at identifying the role of both affective and cognitive explanations in the process of consumers' attitude formation that is induced by information that is brand-related on the Facebook posts.
The discussion and the analysis in the literature review are balanced. The research provides a thorough examination of the conception of Facebook pages as an outlet in which the marketers can promote their brand that assists in understanding the processing of information of the content branded in the Facebook pages by the consumers. The results of the study indicate that through the exposure of consumers to brand-related information on the Facebook posts, their affective along with the cognitive elaborations are concurrently elicited. However, as opposed to the analysis, the findings indicate that only affective elaboration has the significant influence on the attitude formations towards a given text. Consequently, the attitudes of consumers towards given posts their brand evaluations and opinions. According to the findings, affective elaboration is more predictive as compared to cognitive explanation in the determination of consumer attitudes though the two dimensions are comparable in the processing of information. For the main effects, the findings indicate that effective elaboration has a predominant influence on consumers' attitudes for all the experimental conditions. The lack of balance is evident in the results of research that indicate that the affective elaboration affects the attitudes of the consumers while in analysis, the views of various scholars differ. On the one hand, some scholars claim that cognitive explanation plays a significant role in attitude formation. On the contrary, others argue that affective elaboration primarily influences the attitudes.
The applicability of the results is validated by the interaction effects present in almost half of the experimental conditions. The efficient amplification overrides the cognitive elaboration in influencing the processes of decision making in various situations. The findings ascertain that the dominant influence on attitude formation by consumers is the affective elaboration, particularly for the Facebook pages. The synthesized results contribute significantly to the consumer psychology as well as marketing literature on the subject of the relevance of the cognition and affect in evaluating brands specifically in the social media contexts. The article has a balance between the analysis part and the discussion as evidenced by the consistency of the results with the pharmacy effect of affect as suggested by previous research. The implication is that there is a possibility of extending the affect's primacy effect to the brand evaluations by the consumers in the social media domain. Forgas’ affect infusion model offers explanations on the dominance of affect in information processing. The model suggests that affectively loaded information applies an influence on the judgmental process and becomes incorporated in it and enters in the deliberations of the judge and colour the judgmental outcome eventually. Conclusively, the discussion and analysis balance since most of the points in the debate section align with those of in the literature review.
The article acknowledges the strengths along with the weaknesses of the study. For the strengths, the results are consistent with those suggested in previous researches on the pharmacy effect of affect that can be extended in the domain of social media to the brand evaluations by the consumers. Additionally, the results are reliable, and they have immense contributions to the psychology of consumers and marketing literature in areas concerning brand evaluations, especially the social media perspective. Another strength of the findings is its managerial implications regarding the vendors marketing modules in the social media. The study also has some weakness. Foremost, the sole use of fictitious brands for the experimental stimuli caused the lack of prior knowledge or evaluations that consumers could refer to when processing information related to name in the Facebook posts. The lack of non-fictitious brands makes affect to be the primary determinant used in the prediction of attitudinal outcomes. Secondly, the artificiality of the experimental manipulations was carried out at the expense of the interactive utilities that were offered by the Facebook pages. The study used the mock-up Facebook pages as the stimulus, and this degrades the reliability of the findings. If the study had used real Facebook pages on which the consumers could like, comment or even share the brand-related posts, the brand evaluation of the participants could have been different. Future researchers should use a setting of real Facebook pages to stimulate the responses of the consumers. Thirdly, the model might not be applicable in predicting the mechanism of processing the branded content from popular brands due to the use of fictitious names. It is recommendable for future research to investigate whether affect is still the dominant attitude influence in the formation of opinion for the prominent brands on the Facebook pages. Another limitation of this study is the construction of the stimulus Facebook posts in textual formats. Therefore, future researchers need to incorporate visual contents on the brand-related posts to encourage a broad range of consumers’ responses. Lastly, the study only uses the Facebook as the only social media platform to evaluate the affective and cognitive elaborations on the attitude formation by the consumers. The research could have made use of other social media platforms with the gorgeous visual presentation such as Instagram and Pinterest.
The discussion keeps on referring to the points raised in the literature review. For instance, the discussion relates to the primacy effect of affect (Pham et al., 2001) when assessing whether the results are consistent with the effect. According to the results, the primacy effect can be protracted in the social media context to the evaluations of brands by consumers. The discussion also explains the dominance of the affective elaboration in processing information by referring to the Forgas' (1995) affect infusion model discussed in the literature review. The model suggests that information which is affectively loaded influences and becomes integrated into the judgmental processes, colouring the outcomes of the judgments by getting into the deliberations of the judge (Forgas 1995, 39). When the attitude formation is constructive, the occurrence to affect infusion is salient. Another reference to the analysis evident in the discussion is the claim that cognition is the primary determinant in the study on the formation of attitudes along with the persuasiveness of the message (Petty and Cacioppo 1986, 433).
Further, the discussion refers to the analysis when explaining the managerial implications of the study regarding the marketer's social media along with the marketing modules. The consumer-generated contents such as consumer posts are important in the induction of resonance of the consumers with the brands (Wien and Olsen 2012, 504). Additionally, the content that is generated by the marketer is essential in the promotion of consumer's brand evaluations. By referring to (Kramer et al. 2014, 8788), the discussion reveals that the consumer exposure to the active sentimental expressions in the social media perspective results in the emotional contagion that causes them to experience the same pleasurable moments. The users are likely to become fans of the brand depending on their favourable attitudes in magnitude. As analysed in the literature review, brands can benefit from the engagement of the fans in brand-related information from the plausible reach of the consumer fans' friends extensively since the social media is built upon the online social networks of the users (Lipsman et al. 2012, 45). Throughout the discussion, the points raised in the literature review are referred.
References
Chatterjee, P., 2011. Drivers of new product recommending and referral behaviour on social network sites. International Journal of Advertising, 30(1), pp.77-101.
Forgas, J.P., 1995. Mood and judgment: the affect infusion model (AIM). Psychological bulletin, 117(1), p.39.
Kramer, A.D., Guillory, J.E. and Hancock, J.T., 2014. Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(24), pp.8788-8790.
Lipsman, A., Mudd, G., Rich, M. and Bruich, S., 2012. The power of “Like”. Journal of Advertising research, 52(1), pp.40-52.
Petty, R. and Cacioppo, J., 2012. Communication and persuasion: Central and peripheral routes to attitude change. Springer Science & Business Media.
Pham, M.T., Cohen, J.B., Pracejus, J.W. and Hughes, G.D., 2001. Affect monitoring and the primacy of feelings in judgment. Journal of consumer research, 28(2), pp.167-188.
Roy, R. and Ng, S., 2012. Regulatory focus and preference reversal between hedonic and utilitarian consumption. Journal of Consumer Behaviour, 11(1), pp.81-88.
Schindler, R.M. and Bickart, B., 2012. Perceived helpfulness of online consumer reviews: The role of message content and style. Journal of Consumer Behaviour, 11(3), pp.234-243.
Schulze, C., Schöler, L. and Skiera, B., 2014. Not all fun and games: Viral marketing for utilitarian products. Journal of Marketing, 78(1), pp.1-19.
Wien, A.H. and Olsen, S.O., 2012. Evaluation context's role in driving positive word‐of‐mouth intentions. Journal of Consumer Behaviour, 11(6), pp.504-513.
